this PDF file - Revistes Digitals de la UAB
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this PDF file - Revistes Digitals de la UAB
Editor/ Editora Felicity Hand (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) Deputy Editors/ Editores adjuntos E. Guillermo Iglesias Díaz (Universidade de Vigo) Juan Ignacio Oliva Cruz (Universidad de La Laguna) Assistant Editors/ Editores de pruebas Manuel Fernández-Conde (Instituto Cervantes, Belgrade, Serbia) Eva González de Lucas (Instituto Cervantes, Kraków/Cracovia, Poland/Polonia) Maurice O’Connor (Universidad de Cádiz) David Prendergast (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) Christopher Rollason (Independent Scholar) Advisory Board/ Comité Científico Ana Agud Aparicio (Universidad de Salamanca) Débora Betrisey Nadali (Universidad Complutense) Elleke Boehmer (University of Oxford, UK) Devon Campbell-Hall (Southampton Solent University, UK) Alida Carloni Franca (Universidad de Huelva) Isabel Carrera Suárez (Universidad de Oviedo) Pilar Cuder Domínguez (Universidad de Huelva) Bernd Dietz Guerrero (Universidad de Córdoba) Shyama Prasad Ganguly (Jawaharlal Nehru University, India) Taniya Gupta (Universidad de Granada) Vijay Kumar Tadakamalla (Osmania University, Hyderabad, India) Somdatta Mandal (Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, India Belen Martín Lucas (Universidade de Vigo) Mauricio Martínez (Universidad de Los Andes y Universidad EAFIT, Bogotá, Colombia) Vijay Mishra (Murdoch University, Perth, Australia) Alejandra Moreno Álvarez (Universidad de Oviedo) Aparajita Nanda (University of California at Berkeley, United States) Jyoti Nandan (Australian National University, Australia) Antonia Navarro Tejero (Universidad de Córdoba) Virginia Nieto Sandoval (Universidad Antonio de Nebrija) Mariam Pirbhai (Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada) G.J.V. Prasad (Jawaharlal Nehru University, India) Elizabeth Russell (Universitat Rovira i Virgili) Dora Sales Salvador (Universidad Jaume I) Sunny Singh (London Metropolitan University, UK) Cynthia vanden Driesen (University of Western Australia, Australia) Aruna Vasudev (Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema NETPAC, India) Layout/ Maquetación Despatx/ Office B11/144 Departament de Filologia Anglesa i Germanística Facultat de Lletres Edifici B Carrer de la Fortuna Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona 08193 Bellaterra Barcelona Spain Contact/ Contacto [email protected] Tel. +34935811087 Fax +34935812001 http://revistes.uab.cat/indialogs Supporting Association: Spanish Association of India Studies/ Asociación Española de Estudios Interdisciplinarios sobre India http://www.aeeii.org/ Indi@logs, Vol. 1, 2014, ISS.: 2339-8523 Table of Contents/ Tabla de Contenidos ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Editorial Felicity Hand 1–3 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Articles/ Artículos Water, White Tigers and Corrupt eoliberalism: Controversial Entrepreneurs in recent Fiction from the Subcontinent Isabel Alonso Breto 5-22 Ecology and Religion in India: Challenges, Opportunities, Symmetries and Conclusions Jon Eric Vicario Martinez-Taboada 23-40 Indian Rivers Seen by the Greeks of the Roman Imperial Period: from Geographical Precision to Exotic Dreams Claire Muckensturm Poulle 41-54 Reposessing Islam: Affective Identity and Islamic Fundamentalism in Hanif Kureishi Andreas Athanasiades 55-71 Bharati Mukherjee’s Struggle against Cultural Balkanization: the Forging of a ew American Immigrant Writing Mª Luz González, Juan Ignacio Oliva 72-92 India for the Masses: the Typical and the Topical at the Golden Gate International Exposition of Murals (1939-1940) Marisa Peiró Márquez 93-113 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Miscellanea/ Miscelánea From Johanne to Janaki: Bringing Vikings to Varanasi Nilambri Ghai 114-118 Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, The Play as Text and Performance: An Introductory ote D.C.R.A. Goonetilleke 119-123 From Maigania to Malgudi Satendra Nandan 124-132 A Talk with Siddarth Dhanvant Shanghvi Felicity Hand 133-137 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Indi@logs Vol 2 2015, pp. 1-3, ISSN: 2339-8523 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------EDITORIAL FELICITY HAND Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona [email protected] Welcome to Volume 2 of Indi@logs: Spanish Journal of India Studies. When we chose the topic of “Indianness” for the second issue of our journal, we were aware of the dangers of falling into clichéd images of India as colonial stereotypes do indeed die hard. However, to our utmost satisfaction, the authors who have contributed articles to this volume have steered away from the heat and dust, the mysticism, the superstition, the pressures and passions of community and caste, the fabulous wealth of a few and the appalling degradation of many. These nostalgic visions of India have slowly receded into the past to be replaced by the reality of a modern, entrepreneurial economy and a thriving democracy. Naturally one cannot overlook the existing poverty, corruption, environmental concerns and gender inequalities that, sadly, bedevil the subcontinent. However, the articles in this volume have, each in its own specific way, addressed what it was and is to be Indian, what Indianness entails in the 21st century and, most importantly, they have done away with any notion of a shared sense of India, despite the temptation to fall back on this well-worn Orientalist approach. The first three articles centre around the trope of water, usually associated with purity and cleanliness in Indian culture, especially as regards Mother Ganga, but which has become the indirect source of pollution due to current shortages. Isabel Alonso Breto discusses three contemporary Indian novels, all of which involve the use or abuse of water, and which feature somewhat unscrupulous characters who succeed in entrepreneurial India. Despite the critique of bribery and corruption present in these texts, Alonso Breto suggests that the authors subtly empathize with the dubious but understandable methods used to escape poverty. This article links up and complements the work by Eric Vicario, who, from an environmental perspective, argues that the Indian subcontinent is no stranger to ecology and the belief in the interdependence of all living beings. The Indian religions all contain notions of “deep ecology” and Vicario points to the need to promote this traditional understanding as environmental concerns EDITORIAL ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------are becoming one of the major problems in contemporary India. Claire Poulle’s article is also devoted to the theme of water but she goes back to Greek and Roman times in her analysis of the representations of India and its rivers. Poulle claims that the sea and rivers with their corresponding flora and fauna played an important role in how space was defined and understood and how these early texts were in some ways responsible for the clichéd images of Asian countries that have survived almost to our present days. The next two articles deal with the South Asian diapora and its writers and how Indianness and its values survive outside the subcontinent. Andreas Athanasiades engages directly with a highly controversial topic in recent years: the conflicts surrounding identity politics among Muslims born and brought up in the West. He argues that race should no longer feature as the only marker of identity and, instead, proposes we think in terms of affectivity and desire, which could throw light on how the nation and ideas of belonging are configured. Athanasiades rereads Hanif Kureish’s The Black Album and suggests that even after twenty years the choice between Islamic fundamentalism and sexual liberation faced by the characters of the novel could easily be applied to third generation British Muslims today. He claims that religion denies pleasure to its disciples in exchange for a perceived stable sense of identity. M. Luz González and Juan Ignacio Oliva examine the writing of the diasporic Indian writer Bharati Mukherjee, now resident in the United States. Their article analyzes the female characters in Mukherjee’s work and the writer’s outspoken opinion about living in the United States and Canada. The women migrants in Mukherjee’s novels are both transformed by and take an active role in transforming the host society. The novels feature characters from various parts of South Asia, but the emphasis is not so much on the reconstruction of, for example, Indianness but rather on the constant fight against cultural memory, the need to survive in the new homeland. Mukherjee herself rejects the use of a hyphenated identity, thus downplaying the balancing act that migrants are obliged to perform between the roles of nostalgics and battlers. The last article in this volume offers a detailed analysis of the power of the visual image in the creation of knowledge about foreign countries. Marisa Peiró Márquez explores the impact of an art exhibition held in San Francisco in the late 1930s, designed to bring the reality of what India was and what kind of people inhabited its frontiers to a wide audience. She suggests that the sight of the murals of Mexican artist Miguel 2 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.1-3, ISSN 2339-8523 EDITORIAL ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Covarrubias and the cultural knowledge and anthropological information transmitted through them was, for many Americans, their first real contact with India. Despite the fact that many of the murals seem to fall back on stereotypical images, Peiró Márquez argues that they provide insights on pre-Independent India. In the Miscellanea section we are honoured to be able to include work by four outstanding personalities in India studies. Prestigious Sri Lankan scholar, Professor D.C.R.A. Goonetilleke has contributed a perceptive reading of the theatre performance of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. He claims that the play projects a visual representation of India, which underscores the virtual impossibility of taking in India and seeing it whole. Goonetilleke praises the play although he notes its overall lack of cohesion. Author and adult educationalist Nilambri Ghai has graciously allowed us to print an excerpt from the biography of her maternal grandmother, Johanne Nielsen, who learnt to love her country of adoption, India, as much as her own homeland, Denmark. Fijian academic and author, Satendra Nandan, has brilliantly combined a review of Mohan Ramanan’s study of R. K. Narayan with an overview of his own early years in the University of Delhi in his essay “From Maigania to Malgudi”. Last but not least, the current volume reproduces part of an interview conducted by the editor with the writer Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi in which he comments on how he sees contemporary India. With these closing remarks, Shanghvi neatly summarises the issues addressed in the articles of this volume. We look forward to receiving research articles from scholars in Spain and abroad as the success of Indi@logs depends on the international community of Indian enthusiasts, of which we know there are many. Our third volume will focus on the theme of violences which is to be understood in as wide a sense as possible, bearing in mind that the Gandhian notion of ahimsa should never be far from our minds. Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.1-3, ISSN 2339-8523 3 INDIANNESS LO INDIO Indi@logs Vol 2 2015, pp. 5-22, ISSN: 2339-8523 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------WATER, WHITE TIGERS AD CORRUPT EOLIBERALISM: COTROVERSIAL ETREPREEURS I RECET FICTIO FROM THE SUBCOTIET1 ISABEL ALONSO-BRETO Universitat de Barcelona [email protected] Received: 18-11-2014 Accepted: 27-01-2015 ABSTRACT Water has traditionally held a variety of metaphorical meanings in literature. Mostly, however, it has been deployed as a purifying element, endowed with the virtues of cleansing and renewing both persons and situations. Such perception of the substantiating role of water finds an echo in the main Indian cultures, both Hinduism and Islam. This article argues that the traditional metaphorical use of water as connected to renovation is very present in contemporary fiction of South Asian origin, yet its main argument is that this idea of renovation, which has traditionally been perceived as positive, is not necessarily ridden with celebratory aspects in the novels under discussion. Rather, water plays in these works controversial if not highly problematic roles. The works discussed are Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008), Chetan Baghat’s Revolution 2020 (2011), and Moshin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013), novels whose main characters are fictional representations of the pioneers of their generation, in all cases moving from rags to riches at the expense of surrendering to immorality or corruption. Besides entailing a sharp criticism of the indiscriminate neoliberal practices which are enriching certain sectors of Asian societies, these novels denounce the severe misuse of water sources, essential for the daily routines of millions of people who, with the changes brought about by rather abrupt processes of modernization, are deprived of access to their traditional means of subsistence. KEYWORDS: Aravind Adiga, Chetan Baghat, Moshin Hamid, water, neoliberalism, corruption RESUME Agua, Tigres Blancos y eoliberalismo Corrupto:Emprendedores Dudosos en la ueva Literatura del Subcontinente En la tradición literaria se ha atribuido al agua una gran variedad de significados. Mayormente, sin embargo, el elemento líquido se ha significado como un principio purificador, poseedor de las virtudes de limpieza y renovación de personas y situaciones. Este rol sustancial del agua encuentra eco en las culturas mayoritarias de la India, Hinduismo e Islam. Este artículo sugiere que la imagen tradicional del agua como vehículo de renovación está muy presente en la ficción contemporánea del Subcontinente, pero mientras que la idea de renovación se ha percibido generalmente como positiva, en las novelas analizadas el agua no se presenta asociada con aspectos celebratorios sino que, por el contrario, juega un papel controvertido si no abiertamente negativo. Las novelas exploradas son The White Tiger (2008), de Aravind Adiga, Revolution 1 This research is part of the project “Relations and Networks in Indian Ocean Writing,” funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (FFI2012-32626). WATER, WHITE TIGERS AND CORRUPT NEOLIBERALISM ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------2020 (2010), de Chetan Baghat, y How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013), de Moshin Hamid. Los protagonistas de estas novelas son una representación ficticia de los pioneros de su generación, y en todos los casos se enriquecen a costa de llevar a cabo acciones inmorales o corruptas. Si por un lado estos trabajos ofrecen una crítica acerada de las prácticas neoliberales que están enriqueciendo a ciertos sectores de las sociedades en cuestión, también denuncian un manejo incompetente del agua. Este es un bien esencial para las actividades diarias de millones de personas, quienes, sin embargo, con los profundos cambios que conllevan estos abruptos procesos de modernización, se ven privadas de acceso a sus medios de subsistencia tradicionales. PALABRAS CLAVE: Aravind Adiga, Chetan Baghat, Moshin Hamid, agua, neoliberalismo, corrupción Probably without exception, water has been associated with relevant values in human societies. As Yves Bonnefoy remarks in his prestigious Dictionary of Mythologies (2010), in Asian cultures water is connected to myths of origin and of fertility, as well as to funeral rites.2 Bonnefoy acknowledges, however, that most often water has been associated with purity. Thus, it has been frequently endowed with the virtues of cleansing and renewing the world and its people.3 It is precisely for this reason that, in the cultures he refers to, it was often forbidden to pollute the water, be it washing dirty clothes in it, defecating, or even bathing oneself in clean waters. In Hindu culture water is paramount; suffice it to remember the vital –and somewhat clichéd– images of people washing their clothes and making their morning ablutions alongside the ghats of the main Indian rivers, most famously Mother Ganga. While water is revered in Indian cultures, Bonnefoy’s annotation about the traditional directive to avoid the pollution of water is a productive entry into the images of water as presented in the works I shall discuss in this article. In these novels the liquid element is dramatically tainted, at both a symbolic and a material level. In contemporary South Asian writing, water in different forms is endowed with complex and varied metaphorical meanings, yet all of them invariably connected to the idea of transit. The obvious quality of fluidity enables this connection, as it suggests flow and movement. Yet water can also take the form of stagnant pools where the possibility of movement, circulation, or transit appears as remote. One can recall the 2 He refers particularly to the Mongol and Turkish ones. On the purifying virtues of water, see also Gaston Bachelard’s seminal essay Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter. 3 6 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.5-22, ISSN 2339-8523 ISABEL ALONSO-BRETO ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------image of the dark pond of putrid water in the backyard of the household that Anita Desai describes in her novel Clear Light of Day (2003), full of metaphorical implications. Against this stagnant image, in the novels I shall be discussing water figures as a metaphor of transit. This transit is one from tradition to modernity. This very idea, like the image of the Ganga ghats, has become a cliché like the Ganga images, and so it needs qualifying. The modernity reflected in these works is characterized by several features: its vertiginous pace; its virtual inescapability; the excessive demands it places on human beings; and, last but most important, its extreme mercantilist accent. As follows from the stories I shall be discussing, and others thematically connected to these and set in various parts of the continent,4 Asian societies are taking a harshly materialistic turn, where people’s lives are highly influenced (and paradoxically, often deteriorated) by quickly evolving economies. As the writers of these critical novels expose, young and not so young individuals have to juggle their choices to the best of their abilities in order to find their way through a world which increasingly judges them exclusively for their economic achievements. Indeed, none of these novels’ main characters want to be left behind on the promising road to economic success, which has become the dominant ethos in their respective surroundings. Economic success is demanding and expensive; thus the novels present a state of affairs where bribery and corruption are paramount: indeed they are seen as the pre-condition for social success. Escaping the lot of endemic destitution and leaving behind the anonymous mass, which according to Aravind Adiga’s narrator in The White Tiger cannot even exercise the basic right to vote in the so-called “World’s largest democracy”, seems to demand a certain moral ambiguity, if not complete lack of scruples. But it is precisely this ethical laxity that eases the way into a social status that rids the subject from conscripting burdens of the past, fundamentally poverty, but also 4 Pankaj Mishra (2013) mentions Malaysian Tash Aw’s Five Star Millionaire, Yu Hua’s Brothers, set in China, and Randy Bodagoya’s Beggar Feast, set in Sri Lanka. 7 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.5-22, ISSN 2339-8523 WATER, WHITE TIGERS AND CORRUPT NEOLIBERALISM ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------other drawbacks such as low caste, remote birth-place, or the lack of minimal schooling, let alone tertiary education. The careful depiction of the dubious means through which the main characters in each of these novels amass their fortunes provides a bleak depiction of Asian societies, and more generally of a globalized world mostly controlled by rampant capitalism. In a review entitled “Asia: The Explosive Transformation” Pankaj Mishra discusses some Asian novels which respond to the same narrative and ideological pattern. He claims indeed that in our time “the literary vision of capitalism red in tooth and claw is likely to be found mostly in fiction set in contemporary Asia” (Mishra 2013). Mishra’s review is somewhat comforting, insomuch as he recalls that European and American literature produced in the nineteenth century was also full of ambitious characters who managed to rise above the rest and amass amazing fortunes through dubious means, and that this was only the first part of a story that later on became less carnivorous: “Robber barons dominated the early phases of American industrial capitalism before the oil, steel, and railway tycoons, and their family members, descendants, and cronies, gave way to relatively transparent, shareholder-friendly companies” (Mishra 2013, n.p.n.). According to Mishra’s view, then, some need to get rich first in order for others to share their profits later on, and create more democratic systems of wealth distribution. This seems to suggest that the present situation in Asia, in which society can be rightly described as “a jungle” divided into two castes, “those who eat vs. those who are eaten up” (Adiga 2008: 64) as we read in The White Tiger, is only a temporary step towards a more egalitarian situation. Yet it is difficult to obviate the huge social inequalities which keep plaguing American and European societies two centuries after the vertiginous decades of the Industrial Revolution and its aftermath, when the novels Mishra refers to were written. And in the India of the present day, in spite of the nation’s enrichment (India being one of the BRICS nations whose economies are evolving dramatically), the situation is far from improving for the mass of the people. Mishra himself reminds us that “in “rising” India, … while a handful of Indian billionaires increased their share of national income from less than 1 percent in 1996 to 22 percent in 2008, … the number of malnourished children, nearly 50 percent, has barely altered” (Mishra, n.p.n.). It 8 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.5-22, ISSN 2339-8523 ISABEL ALONSO-BRETO ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------appears that any optimism about an impending redistribution of wealth and more equitable societies in Asia should be moderate. Many contemporary Asian novels raise important ethical questions about this transit into modernity-as-wealth or, more accurately, modernity-as-unevenly-distributed wealth. The critical discussions of these works frequently focus on ethical cum socioeconomic questions, and, more generally, reflect upon the “rising Asia” (Hamid 2013) scenarios that these novels illustrate. Lena Khor’s analysis in “Can the Subaltern Right Wrongs? Human Rights and Development in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger”, for instance, connects the 2008 Man Booker Prize winner to concepts as enlightening as Spivak’s idea of a “World Class Apartheid” (Khor 2012: 43), that the novel would denounce, or to social theories like Sankara Krishna’s “Underdevelopment School of Thought,” inspired by the Dependency Theories which gained currency in the 1960s and which maintained that the ‘developed’ countries were richer than the ‘Third World’ countries precisely because they developed at their expense (Khor 2012: 45). Indeed, the main characters in these stories are poor because their families have been robbed, not only symbolically but quite literally in all cases, and thus it may appear as justifiable that, when they manage to redress this grievance, these men would do so at the expense of robbing others. Lena Khor also refers to Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash’s “One Third World/Two Thirds World” theory, where the old divide between the First and Third worlds is replaced by another configuration, in which the elites of the former Third World and the newly impoverished masses in the West have swapped places, and are filed next to those who either “have” or “do not have” as much as them, regardless of their geographical location (so that we have pockets of the First World in the Third World and viceversa). In short, Khor suggests that The White Tiger “captures the palimpsestic way in which legacies of underdevelopment overlay themselves upon themselves, individuals, communities and nations” (Khor 2012: 45). Thus, this critic’s insightful analysis of the criticism of the uneven economic structures in The White Tiger 9 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.5-22, ISSN 2339-8523 WATER, WHITE TIGERS AND CORRUPT NEOLIBERALISM ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------could successfully apply to the rest of novels in question, all three of which respond to what has been labeled as the “condition-of-India-novel” (Detmers 2011).5 The focus of the novels’ critique is on the figure of the successful self-made entrepreneur. All three protagonists, Aravind Adiga’s Balram Halway, Chetan Bhagat’s Gopal Mishra and the anonymous narrator of Moshin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, manage to rise from rags to riches through dubious means. And, interestingly, the three novels present ingenious narrative strategies that allow the use of the first or second person, and thus present the entrepreneur’s experience from a very personal perspective: The White Tiger consists of a collection of letters written to the Chinese (former) Prime Minister, Wen Jia Bao; Revolution 2020 reproduces verbatim a first-hand confession made to the writer himself -whose real name appears in the narrative. Somewhat more sophisticated, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia replicates the structure and formal rhetoric of a self-help book, narrating the facts in the second person in the form of advice, yet still, like the others, from a very close perspective. Of course this allows the reader a very close glimpse of their many illicit activities, and therefore it invites harsh judgment and, simultaneously, a degree of leniency in the final verdict. It is my claim that, while the novels’ criticism of the system is implacable, the take on these characters is attractively ambivalent: in all cases the narrative shape aims at not only narrating but also justifying their controversial achievements. The narrative strategies entail a clear invitation to empathize, if not fully sympathize, with each of them. In a way, all three are forced to succeed in order to survive, and the reader can only sanction this. Further, we are induced to admire them, to share the joy of their achievement with a compromised sense of guilt and lightness. In different ways, the three narratives parody the image of the successful entrepreneur as projected by the self-help books that at present are best-sellers in India and elsewhere (Venugopal 2011). A curious coincidence –or perhaps not quite so coincidental-, is that one of the world gurus of entrepreneur leadership, Robin Sharma, a Canadian of Indian ancestry who authored the hugely successful The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari (1997), published in 2011 his second international hit: Be a Leader without a Title. This title 5 For further critiques of the pernicious effects of the expansion of neoliberal politics as reflected in The White Tiger see also Al-Dagamseh 2013, Joseph 2012 and Thoker 2012. 10 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.5-22, ISSN 2339-8523 ISABEL ALONSO-BRETO ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------echoes the condition of these three main characters, none of whom received a university degree - nor finished their primary school in two cases. The coincidence is remarkable also because of the fact that when he manages to change his destiny through killing his master, the white tiger Balram Halway will change his first name to that of his master: Ashok, choosing, again perhaps by chance, the surname Sharma. Water accompanies and illustrates these social trajectories, and it is played out through different tropes, its fluidity always suggesting the continuous evolution of society –its transit. It some cases, the liquid element features as a highly symbolic testimony of the situation explored, while in others it is exploited as an instrument of self-improvement. The novels play on the huge symbolic meaning of water in Hinduism and Islam, and at the same time bear upon the significant shortage of water that Asian societies are suffering because of the combined realities of “growing populations, rapid urbanization, and competing demand for water for agriculture, energy, industrial, and domestic use.”6 Water is a key issue in present Asian politics, and as such it is one of the Focus Areas of the Asian Development Bank, an institution fully aware of the kind of problems tackled by these novels: Annual per capita water supplies have been declining at alarming rates, with some parts of Asia and the Pacific already below 1,000 cubic meters per capita per year. The gap between demand and supply is widening. At an aggregate level, it is forecast to get steadily worse, indicating increasing water shortages. This gap will lead to increased competition between water users—farmers, energy producers, households, and businesses.7 Besides reporting on unscrupulous means of self-enrichment, and criticising severe wealth inequality and corruption in quickly developing Asian societies, the novels tackle the crucial matter of water shortage and pollution, and the subsequent necessity to clean and distribute it, a pressing issue at global, Asian and Indian levels. 6 7 http://www.adb.org/sectors/water/overview. Access 16 October 2014. http://www.adb.org/sectors/water/overview 11 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.5-22, ISSN 2339-8523 WATER, WHITE TIGERS AND CORRUPT NEOLIBERALISM ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008) is organized around a crucial reference to the river Ganga. Its protagonist, Balram Halway, has a first and decisive epiphany at his mother’s funeral, which he attends as a child by the waters of the holy river. As he sees that his mother’s corpse is being devoured by “a giant oozing mound of black mud” (Adiga 16) in the Ganga riverbank, he becomes suddenly aware that the idea of circularity that governs Hindu philosophy and life means that he will have to resign himself to his lot of destitution, since “nothing would be liberated here” (Adiga 2008: 16). This episode marks the beginning of Balram’s road to awareness of and reaction against the life-long burden of having to be a serf for others. Balram writes the letters which compound his narrative as an adult from the perspective of his new identity as Ashok Sharma, which he achieves, as announced above, after the feat of murdering his master and robbing him of a bag full of money. With that money he became founder and CEO of a thriving taxi company in Bangalore, specialized in driving the employees of foreign outsourcing companies to and from their workplaces at untimely hours. Ashok Sharma thus grows inordinately rich. Crucially, he manages so well because he hasn’t broken the chain of economic bribery he learnt about when he was a servant for powerful masters. Indeed he keeps acting in corrupt ways himself, which quickly boosts his way into affluence. Admittedly, however, he introduces small changes in his behavior as an employer, which perhaps signal, albeit weakly, the beginning of change, such as signing work contracts for his employees that he fully respects, and also responding to his responsibilities, of whatever kind, as head of his taxi company.8 Yet, in spite of his success, Balram/Ashok’s view of the state of affairs in Indian society is derisive, and his criticism points at Mother Ganga as the great signifier of decadence. Indeed, to a great extent the great national narrative of India is constructed around the image and values of the sacred river, a refrain which Balram repeats quite ironically: “Mother Ganga, daughter of the Vedas, river of illumination, protector of us all, breaker of the chain of birth and rebirth” (Adiga 2008: 15). Against this received narrative, Balram/Ashok posits the sordid reality of the river as being “full of faeces, straw, soggy parts of human bodies, buffalo carrion and seven different kinds of industrial acids” 8 For instance, when one of his drivers hits a cyclist and kills him, he takes on the responsibility, and even visits the victim’s family to compensate them economically, whereas as a driver he was induced to take the responsibility for a hit-and-run caused by one of his masters. 12 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.5-22, ISSN 2339-8523 ISABEL ALONSO-BRETO ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------(Adiga 2008: 15). This image synthesizes the novel’s verdict on India. Yet there is room for ambivalence, because in spite of the huge critical irony permeating the book, the fact that this character manages to rise above the rest and succeed in breaking out of “the Great Indian rooster coop”, the ironic metaphor he finds to refer to the state of destitution and servitude in which the majority of people of India are forced to subsist is presented, on the whole, not without sympathy. One of the strengths of The White Tiger is precisely the way in which Balram/Ashok’s narrative carefully constructs an apology for his heinous crime. The novel eventually suggests that his is a necessary reaction, since it appears as the only possibility to escape a fate of rampant exploitation, a feat that only somebody as exceptional as this character, a true White Tiger which only appears once in a generation, could achieve. Balram/Ashok’s story of success recalls Frantz Fanon’s ideas about violence as necessary to advance the anti-colonial struggle and achieve freedom. Indeed, Balram’s violent transit from serfdom to mastery of self and his change of identity into Ashok recalls Fanon’s statement that “violence is man re-creating himself” (Fanon 1963: 40). Also Michel Foucault has been explicit about the moral obligation humans have to react against the frozen power structures that exploit and immobilize them: We have to rise up against all forms of power—but not just power in the narrow sense of the word, referring to the power of a government or of one social group over another: these are only a few particular instances of power. Power is anything that tends to render immobile and untouchable those things that are offered to us as real, as true, as good. (Foucault 1980, n.p.n.) As a driver and servant, Balram lives in close contact with the benefits of wealth, and as such he cannot be indifferent to them. It is difficult to judge his crime without taking into account the pitiful picture of the homeless or slum-dwellers, as well as the heartless exploitation of the servants he has presented us with earlier on, and thus the door to ethical ambiguity is left ajar. 13 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.5-22, ISSN 2339-8523 WATER, WHITE TIGERS AND CORRUPT NEOLIBERALISM ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------All in all, Balram’s symbolic and physical transit is one from tradition in “the Darkness,” a heavily oppressive reference to ancestral India embodied in his mother’s battered corpse being burned in the Ghats of the sacred/filthy river, to modernity in “the Light,” a new site of freedom, again both literal and metaphorical, where he can choose the type of person he wants to be –a world ripe with possibilities symbolically embodied by his numerous chandeliers. Mother Ganga features even more prominently in Chetan Baghat’s Revolution 2020. Love. Corruption. Ambition. (2011). Actually, the novel is dedicated “to the city of Varanasi” and “to the holy river.” Here we have another “rags to riches” story in which the main character thrives in spite, or precisely because of his lack of scruples. Born in Varanasi, Gopal Mishra grows up as a motherless orphan living with his father, who is affected by tuberculosis, a pattern which reproduces exactly that of Balram Halwai/Ashok Sharma (the metaphor of the dead mother is actually recurrent in Indian Writing in English). Gopal has two close friends, Raghav and Aarti, the second of whom he falls in love with as a teenager. When the time comes to choose a professional career, he joins the thousands of young Indians attempting to pass the greatly coveted AIEE (All Indian Engineering Entrance Exam) and IIT JEE (Indian Institute of Technology Joint Entrance Exam). Failing to get a qualification that would allow him to enter any Engineering Faculty while Raghav obtains an excellent grade, Gopal sees himself forced by his father to repeat the attempt, with the sad result that he fails again while his father has become heavily indebted. Meanwhile, Aarti has got engaged to Raghav, and Gopal is mortally jealous. Like Balram, Gopal’s choice of rising to success through means not altogether transparent is also justified. Not reaching a sufficiently high grade in AIEEE was not his fault, and while he was willing to enter another faculty so as to get any university degree even if it was not engineering, and work part time to cover the home expenses, his father forced him to try a second time, thus fully debasing the boy’s sense of selfesteem. Gopal’s second failure means still bigger distress, but worse for him is his father’s disillusion. Actually, the father will die soon afterwards, leaving Gopal with the sad remorse that his failure has contributed to precipitating his father’s demise, rather a 14 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.5-22, ISSN 2339-8523 ISABEL ALONSO-BRETO ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------heavy burden to live with for a barely twenty-year-old youth. The father’s fixation that Gopal should become an engineer testifies to India’s present obsession with technology: in most circles, engineering is seen as the surest, perhaps the only means to find a good job. Gopal’s story is set in Varanasi, the spiritual centre of Hinduism. The rampant corruption that is going to be exposed thus gains deep meaning, symbolically spanning the subcontinent. As a teenager, Gopal often takes Aarti to row on the river Ganga. They spend placid hours in a hired boat until sunset, routinely accompanied by the busy ghats in the near distance, seeing the cremation fires and the aarti lamps at sunset. The holy river appears as a comfort zone for those who live in Varanasi, and also as a signifier of possibilities. Soon after his double failure and his father’s death, Gopal meets Shukla-Ji, a corrupt MLA (Member of the Legislative Assembly) whose power to achieve anything through raw bribery seems to have no limits. Shukla-Ji helps Gopal settle a land dispute his father had maintained with his own brother, who for decades had swindled him in a callous effort to take over his land portion. The violent means Shukla-Ji’s men employ to get rid of Gopal’s uncle’s grip on the land are, therefore, perceived as a variant of poetic justice, and this apologetic tone somewhat applies to the whole of Gopal’s socio-economic progression. The first person narrative contributes to this effect. As immediate listeners we sympathise with his misapprehensions as he becomes the wealthy director of a private Engineering College, built on his land with irregular funding provided by Shukla-Ji. Gopal’s growing fortune is built both on his daily work (he toils hard to ensure the success of his college) and on the envelopes he soon learns to administer right and left in order to get the right permissions to construct, etc. Gopal is hardly aware that GangaTech, as the college is named, is used by the mendacious MLA as a trust to distract public attention from a possible scandal around the Ganga Action Plan, whereby he had diverted to his pocket a huge amount of public funds that were destined to tidy up the holy river. If real, this fictional plan would have been part of current policies intended to alleviate the fact that “in large parts of Asia and the Pacific, more than 80% of the volume of untreated wastewater leaches into accessible freshwaters and coastal waters [with the result that] public health 15 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.5-22, ISSN 2339-8523 WATER, WHITE TIGERS AND CORRUPT NEOLIBERALISM ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------consequences are significantly affecting lives, livelihoods, and productivity.”9 Yet despite Shukla-Ji’s efforts to keep this blatant robbery hidden, the uncomfortable truth is disclosed by Raghav, who, ironically, has become a journalist and not an engineer. Raghav publishes an article with the results of his investigation entitled “MLA makes money by making holy river filthy” (Baghat 234), whose readers learn that their political representative’s greed is the reason why the sewage systems around Varanasi have so completely collapsed that illness is quickly spreading and causing the death of hundreds of children and elderly people. As Gopal himself formulates it, “a politician stealing is bad enough, but to rob from the holy river is the worst sin” (Baghat 2011: 236). Shukla-Ji is forced to resign and is imprisoned. Now, the turning point in Gopal’s life comes when, given the chance to continue his mentor’s career in politics, he eventually decides to give up this possibility, as well as his marriage to his beloved Aarti, because both would be grounded on lies and corruption. With this unexpected twist of events, Gopal is shown to remain at a distance from Balram/Ashok, not only because he does not go as far as committing murder, but also because he ends up sacrificing what he loves most –Aarti– for the sake of sheer honesty. At first sight, this movement is somewhat difficult to believe, as one could think that Gopal could have given up politics yet married Aarti, leaving corruption behind from that moment. But this seems to be an unattainable possibility: The inference of this “moral fable” thus seems to be that, in India at least, it is impossible to stand outside of corruption if one wants to keep certain economic standards. All in all, then, in the end like Balram/Ashok, Gopal does not appear as a truly debased villain either. On the other hand, a heroic figure is promoted: that of Raghav, founder of the political pamphlet Revolution 2020, which somewhat naively promotes a revolution where Indian youth will rise and overturn the corrupt government and unfair system. It is Raghav who in the end marries Aarti and begins a career in politics, the inference being that he has more chances to redress a deeply polluted system; as polluted, according to Revolution 2020 and The White Tiger, as the holy water of the river Ganga. 9 http://www.adb.org/sectors/water/overview. 16 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.5-22, ISSN 2339-8523 ISABEL ALONSO-BRETO ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia takes us to an unnamed city which, given Moshin Hamid’s origin, we can situate somewhere in Pakistan, but also anywhere in Asia. There is no holy river this time, but water appears as a crucial resource, getting hold of which means acquiring money and power. Like the city, the successful entrepreneur here is unnamed. He shares with Balram/Ashok and Gopal a poor childhood and scarce possibilities to survive with dignity. Soon orphaned like them, his first employment is already tainted, as it consists of selling “non-expired-labelled expired goods” (Hamid 2013: 99), that is, stale food. Yet he soon begins his own business, consisting of the irregular production and sale of bottled water. This is only the beginning of his economic rise. Devoid here of metaphysical connotations, water appears nonetheless just as necessary, coveted and contaminated as it does in the other two stories: Your city’s neglected pipes are cracking, the contents of underground water mains and sewers mingling, with the result that taps in locales rich and poor alike disgorge liquids that, while for the most part clear and often odourless, reliably contain trace of faeces and microorganisms capable of causing diarrhea, hepatitis, dysentery and typhoid. Those less well off among the citizenry harden their immune systems by drinking freely, sometimes suffering losses in the process, especially of their young and their frail. (Hamid 2013: 99) In this uncertain landscape, “Those better-off have switched to bottled water” (Hamid 2013: 99), an entrepreneurship niche that our hero is quick to occupy. Years later, already a millionaire from selling bottled water, he is contacted by members of his country’s high spheres and army to be part of a national scheme intended to provide quality water through the tap. The operation, called phase ten, is paramount, pinpointing the value of water: “Phase ten is big,” he is told when proposed to be part of the project, “it is bigger than phases one to five put together. Bigger than seven and eight combined. Better than six, and six was huge. Ten is a milestone. A flagship. With ten we are taking it to the next level” (Hamid 2013: 163). As with Shukla Ji’s Ganga Action Plan, in this operation public profit, corruption and individual accumulation of 17 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.5-22, ISSN 2339-8523 WATER, WHITE TIGERS AND CORRUPT NEOLIBERALISM ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------money are impossible to disentangle. It is difficult to become part of the scheme and not take as much personal profit as possible. Such an idea would actually be nonsense, because ‘When we military-related business advance into a market, the front lines change rapidly. We get permissions no one else can get. Red tape dissolves effortlessly for us. And reappears around our competitors. … And in this case we are going ahead whether you partner with us or not. Better to be close to us that to be yet another incumbent we swat aside. Besides, at least in the near term, we are simply offering you too much cash for you to walk away.’ ‘Yes.’ You say inevitably, and as expected. (Hamid 2013: 163-164) However dubious, plan ten responds to a pressing demand for clean water in the country, which echoes those in other rapidly developing Asian countries. Although it will also mean the possibility for a chosen few to illicitly grow rich (or richer), and unless it is fully sabotaged by corruption and greed as happened to the Ganga Action Plan in Revolution 2020, hopefully its implantation will mean an instrumental improvement in the lives of millions of people. Ironically, thus, in spite of this sordid planning scene, which resolves our protagonist’s comfortable future, Plan Ten can be seen to respond to Brahma Chellaney’s suggestion that in an era of growing constraints on augmenting the supply of the most essential resource –water– Asian countries must seek sustainable, cost-effective solutions through collaborative efforts… Competing demands for scarce water resources pose economic, social and political threats that can be contained through forward looking policies … which depend on linking stakeholders together, collecting reliable data on water resources, and enunciating specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely – SMART– goals. (Chellaney 2013: 305) In conclusion, in the three narratives explored here, water figures prominently. Water is used to signify and criticize a relentless progression towards economic development, yet one which ignores the well-being of millions of people, for whom the situation is increasingly worse. Modernization is causing their water to be more polluted and scarce 18 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.5-22, ISSN 2339-8523 ISABEL ALONSO-BRETO ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------than ever, a result of the quick and indiscriminate processes of construction and industrialization. In this conjunction, certain individuals manage to make the most of their also scarce resources and to rise economically, leaving behind those who were like them. And they do so through very dubious methods. These methods, which apparently are those operating in the higher spheres of society, are metaphorically mirrored in the holy waters of the most sacred of the Indian rivers, Mother Ganga. The holy river is presented in two of the novels as a focus of dirt and infection. This problem, which applies to Asian water more generally, ironically creates further possibilities for economic corruption through fake cleaning and purifying schemes. Thus, besides appearing as a necessary and scarce resource for the people, water is still endowed, as in traditional accounts, with a strong symbolic function. The shift from perceiving Mother Ganga as the mythical site of spiritual renewal to realising that it has become the material site of pollution and infection reads as a warning on the part of these authors, that the path to modernity demands a heavy toll, and that modernity does not automatically mean universal inclusion. In the transit from traditional societies, by no means presented as perfect, to more modern ones, the worst lot falls on those occupying the lower ranks of society, whose serious difficulties to survive are aggravated by increasing environmental problems. Only a few chosen individuals –white tigers of their kind- manage to rise above the mud of poverty, destitution and lack of prospects, and their rise takes place only through very controversial means. It is thanks to these pioneering entrepreneurs that “we gain awareness of a lost people with great potential to change Indian culture” (Waller 2012). Through their engaging and ethically committed narratives, these “Asian-type Horatio Algers” (Mishra 2013) appear as the unofficial spokespersons of a large sector of Indian and Asian societies which is left lagging behind in the vertiginous race of rising Asian economies. These silent masses slowly begin to be heard through the revealing narratives of pioneering figures such as those of Gopal, Balram/Ashok and that unnamed entrepreneur who gets “filthy rich in rising Asia”; that is, those who have managed to rise above the rest and become vocal. Although largely forgotten in official narratives of national enrichment, the silent masses are made visible in these novels. We can trace them in the 19 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.5-22, ISSN 2339-8523 WATER, WHITE TIGERS AND CORRUPT NEOLIBERALISM ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------symbolically anonymous hands imprinted on the plaster of Balram’s pigsty in the basement he shares with other drivers, where he spends the nights proactively planning the murder and appropriation of his master’s wealth and identity. The masses also feature in the thousands of country workers who invest all their life savings in enrolling their elder son in GangaTech so that he may, God willing, become an engineer. Barely glimpsed through the cracks of these ironic narratives of exceptional success, the anonymous masses are nonetheless full of possibilities. As Pankaj Mishra formulates it, though largely mute in these dramas of Asian capitalism, the future really belongs to this invisible majority of the “filthy poor”—people who can’t even try to enlarge their limits of possibility, but retain the silent potential of weeds that can overrun the world’s most zealously maintained gardens. (Mishra 2013, n.p.n.) As foreseen by Mishra, these silent masses might one day overrun those zealously maintained gardens, and, as Franz Fanon commends and Michel Foucault subscribes, rise against their exploiters. They would then fulfil Fanon’s insight that “Decolonization … transforms spectators crushed with their inessentiality into privileged actors, with the grandiose glare of history’s floodlights upon them” (Fanon 1963: 36). This decolonization, which in the 21st century needs to take on an economic rather than a political accent, has so far been only accomplished by a few daring entrepreneurs, the white tigers of their generation, some of whom inhabit the pages of the most incisive of recent Asian fiction. WORKS CITED ADIGA, ARAVIND. 2008. The White Tiger. London: Atlantic Books AL-DAGAMSEH, ABDULLAH M. 2013. "Adiga's The White Tiger as World Bank Literature." CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 15.6. 20 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.5-22, ISSN 2339-8523 ISABEL ALONSO-BRETO ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ASIAN DEVELOPMENT 15/10/2014. BANK. http://www.adb.org/sectors/water/overview Access ASIAN WATER DEVELOPMENT OUTLOOK 2013. http://www.adb.org/publications/asianwater-development-outlook-2013. Access 15/10/2014. AW, TASH. 2013. Five Star Millionaire. New York: Spiegel & Grau. BACHELARD, GASTON. 1983. Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter. Dallas: The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. Trans. Edith R. Farrell. BHAGAT, CHETAN. 2011. Revolution 2020. Love. Corruption. Ambition. New Delhi: Rupa Books. BODAGOYA, RANDY. 2011. Beggar’s Feast. Toronto: Penguin Canada. BONNEFOY, YVES. 2010 (1981). Diccionario de mitologías. Barcelona: Backlist. CHELLANEY, BRAHMA. 2013. Water: Asia’s ew Battleground. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press. DESAI, ANITA. 2003 (1980). Clear Light of Day. New Delhi: Atlantic. DETMERS, INES. 2011. “New India? New Metropolis? Reading Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger as a ‘condition-of-India novel’.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing Vol. 47, No. 5, December 2011, 535–545. FANON, FRANTZ. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press. Trans. Constance Farrington. FOUCAULT, MICHEL. 1980. “Power, Morals and the Intellectual.” An interview conducted by Michael Bes. https://my.vanderbilt.edu/michaelbess/foucaultinterview/ Access 16/10/2014. HAMID, MOSHIN. 2013. “How To Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.” London: Penguin. HUA, YU. 2009. Brothers. New York: Pantheon. JOSEPH, BETTY. 2012. “Neoliberalism and Allegory.” Cultural Critique, Volume 82, Fall 2012, pp. 68-94. JOSHI, DEEPA & BEN FAWCETT. 2001. “Water, Hindu Mythology and an Unequal Social Order in India.” Paper presented at the Second Conference of the International 21 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.5-22, ISSN 2339-8523 WATER, WHITE TIGERS AND CORRUPT NEOLIBERALISM ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Water History Association, Bergen, Germany, August 2001. http://r4d.dfid.gov.uk/PDF/Outputs/R65755.pdf. Access 16/10/2014. KHOR, LENA. 2012. “Can the Subaltern Right Wrongs?: Human Rights and Development in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger.” South Central Review 29 (1&2) 41-67. MISHRA, PANKAJ. 2013. “Asia: ‘The Explosive Transformation’.” The ew York Review of Books. April 25 2013 Issue. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/apr/25/asia-explosivetransformation/?pagination=false. Access 8/10/2014 SCHOTLAND, SARAH D. 2011. “Breaking Out the Rooster Coop: Violent Crime in Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger and Richard Wright’s ative Son.” Comparative Literature Studies 48, 1-19. SHARMA, ROBIN. 2007. The Monk Who Sold his Ferrari: A Fable about Fulfilling your Deams and Reaching your Destiny. Mumbai, India: Jaico Publishing House. ------------------------------. 2011. The Leader Who Had o Title. Mumbai, India: Jaico Publishing House. THOFER, IRFAN. 2012. “Economic Growth: A mirage in India in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger.” Indian Streams Journal. Vol II Iss. IX, p. 1436. VENUGOPAL, VEENA. 2011. “India’s Imported Enlightenment.” Publishing Perspectives. http://publishingperspectives.com/2011/06/indias-importedJune 21, 2001. enlightenment-self-help-bestsellers/ WALLER, KATHLEEN. 2012. “Redefinitions of India and Individuality in Adiga’s The White Tiger.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 14.2. 22 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.5-22, ISSN 2339-8523 Indi@logs Vol 2 2015, pp. 23-40, ISSN: 2339-8523 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ECOLOGÍA Y RELIGIÓ E IDIA: DESAFÍOS, OPORTUIDADES, SIMETRÍAS Y COCLUSIOES JON ERIC VICARIO MARTINEZ-TABOADA Independent Researcher [email protected] Recibido: 20-11-2014 Aceptado: 19-01-2015 RESUME La ecología y las ciencias de la naturaleza están cambiando la conciencia de la humanidad a través de una “nueva cosmología” que, por primera vez, determina objetivamente el lugar, el tiempo, los sujetos, los procesos y las interrelaciones de la realidad. Muchas de las conclusiones de este nuevo imaginario científico presentan coincidencias con las tradiciones ancestrales de la humanidad, las cuales libres del antropocentrismo de las religiones abrahámicas consideran la naturaleza como sujeto de hecho y de derecho. En India, el individuo fue concebido como parte de un todo interdependiente milenios antes que el estudio de los ecosistemas certificara esta realidad. Consecuentemente, es en India donde muchos postulados de sus tradiciones religiosas y filosóficas muestran simetrías conceptuales con la “nueva cosmología”. Este trabajo expone los proyectos donde ecología y religión funcionan juntos en India, y las simetrías más importantes entre las visiones tradicionales indias y los argumentos de la ecología moderna, para sacar conclusiones sobre la relevancia de estas similitudes frente a los desafíos del problema ecológico y nuestra inoperancia fáctica frente a él. PALABRAS CLAVE: ABSTRACT Ecología, Religión, Simetrías, Movimientos, Proyectos, Agua. Ecology and Religion in India: Challenges, Opportunities, Symmetries and Conclusions. Ecology and the discoveries of the sciences of the nature are changing human conscience through a “new cosmology”. Consequently we see for the first time a new and objective determination of reality including its place, time, subjects, processes and interrelationships. It is a fact that many of these conclusions are similar to the ones expressed by the ancestral traditions of humanity. For these traditions, free from the Abrahamic anthropocentrism, nature was always a subject of law with its own rights. In India, man was conceived as part of an interdependent whole, millennia before the study of ecosystems did certify this reality. That is why we find in India many symmetries in line with this “new cosmology”. This paper will expose the most important of these symmetries and the projects were ecology and religions do work together in India to draw conclusions on its relevance regarding the ecological problem and our failure in addressing it. KEYWORDS: Ecology, Religion, Simetries, Movements, Projects, Water ECOLOGÍA Y RELIGIÓN EN INDIA ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Introducción La ecología y las ciencias de la naturaleza y del cosmos están cambiando la conciencia de la humanidad a través de una “nueva cosmología” (Vigil, 2010) o “nueva concepción sistémica” (Capra, 1997: 50) que por primera vez determina objetivamente la realidad, esto es, el lugar, el tiempo, los sujetos, los procesos y las interrelaciones de todos ellos. Esta nueva cosmología se nutre de múltiples fuentes, entre las que podemos destacar el estudio de los ecosistemas y la toma de conciencia de la degradación del medio natural, que han dado lugar al desarrollo de la conciencia ecológica; y los descubrimientos de la física y las ciencias del cosmos, que han cambiado nuestro comprensión sobre el origen del universo, de la materia y del planeta, invalidando los fabulosos mitos de nuestros antepasados. La imagen de la naturaleza, de la vida, del hombre, del mundo y del cosmos ha cambiado y tenemos por tanto un nuevo imaginario igual para todas las tradiciones, “para toda la humanidad, para todos los pueblos del planeta (…) hemos cambiado de mundo, y con ello, de alguna manera, pasamos a ser otros, ciudadanos de otro mundo, partes de otra realidad. Esta situación desafía todos los componentes de nuestra visión.” (Vigil, 2010). Esto genera importantes resistencias desde los sectores conservadores y críticas por lo que éstos consideran extralimitaciones de ecologistas y científicos cuando sus descubrimientos y teorías afectan campos del saber tradicionalmente reservados a la religión y a la filosofía. Ocurre que, mientras que en el mundo occidental son percibidas como nuevas, muchas de las conclusiones de este nuevo imaginario científico presentan similitudes, en sus conceptos y comportamientos, con las tradiciones ancestrales de la humanidad; éstas, libres del antropocentrismo de las religiones abrahámicas, consideran aún hoy en día la naturaleza como sujeto de hecho y de derecho. En India, el individuo fue concebido como parte de un todo interdependiente milenios antes de que el estudio de los ecosistemas certificara esta realidad. Consecuentemente, es en India donde muchos postulados de sus tradiciones religiosas y filosóficas muestran similitudes con los conceptos de esta “nueva cosmología” e incluso con los comportamientos que de estos se derivan. Sin embargo, ni los saberes ancestrales ni los descubrimientos y postulados de la ciencia parecen capaces por sí solos de cambiar la actitud de la humanidad respecto a los desafíos del problema ecológico, e India dista mucho de ser el ejemplo de buenas 24 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.23-40, ISSN 2339-8523 JON ERIC VICARIO ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------prácticas medioambientales que se podría suponer dada la riqueza de su cultura proecológica. Este trabajo pretende exponer las simetrías conceptuales entre la tradición india y las conclusiones de la ecología moderna, así como exponer casos donde ecología y religión trabajan juntos en India, para sacar conclusiones a la luz de los desafíos actuales. Ecología y religión en India Hoy en día, la rápida penetración de tecnologías que permiten y alientan un consumo exponencial de recursos y una producción siempre mayor de residuos está creando preocupantes problemas ecológicos en India. La demanda de una población creciente, la cultura del consumismo y del dinero, se convierten, como en el resto del mundo, en los imperativos que dictan las normas de desarrollo del país. Las consecuencias son preocupantes, bien conocidas y manifiestas en todos los ecosistemas. En el ámbito oficial, se prevé en los próximos años una marcada prioridad a la inversión y al desarrollo económico del país, que si bien es positivo desde un punto de vista de desarrollo social, conlleva un importante impacto sobre los intereses medioambientales que activistas y ecologistas por su parte pretenden suavizar. Ciertas iniciativas gubernamentales, como el proyecto de “rejuvenecimiento” del Ganges cuentan con un apoyo mayoritario aunque sus posibilidades de éxito pasen por una muy necesaria reorganización de prioridades. Otras, sin embargo, han levantado dudas entre los movimientos ecologistas. En 2014, el cargo de Ministro de Medioambiente ha sido amalgamado al de Ministro de Telecomunicaciones y al de Asuntos Parlamentarios, siguiendo la nueva directriz de “Less Government, More Governance”; se han reducido los controles de los panchayats (gobiernos locales) tribales sobre proyectos en sus tierras, así como el número de expertos independientes en el ational Board of Wildlife, eliminado las “trabas” de audiencia pública para el desarrollo de proyectos de minas y de licencia para proyectos de irrigación, además de levantarse la moratoria para nuevos proyectos en zonas críticamente contaminadas. Pero esta familiar relación de colaboración-enfrentamiento entre Gobierno y activistas tiene en India un tercer factor distintivo que resulta interesante. Las tradiciones y congregaciones de templos y ashrams son mucho más dinámicas en India que sus homólogos en el resto del mundo. Su rol como agentes transformadores, mediadores y Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.23-40, ISSN 2339-8523 25 ECOLOGÍA Y RELIGIÓN EN INDIA ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------canalizadores de una popularísima y poderosa masa de fieles de distintas comunidades es crítico. Por esto, una colaboración eficiente entre religiones, ecologistas, científicos y ciudadanos puede tener efectos profundos en la sociedad, aunque esta sea una visión no exenta de dificultad. Las buenas noticias son que esta alianza se ha puesto en marcha, goza de buena salud y que aunque está todavía en sus primeros pasos, las más importantes tradiciones y templos indios están participando cada vez más y mejor en el cuidado del medioambiente. La reforestación y la protección de los árboles es el movimiento proteccionista más antiguo y popular en India. Cuenta con el apoyo de numerosos templos y de movimientos específicos, como el histórico Chipko Movement, que inició sus actividades en los años setenta inspirándose en la resistencia no violenta de Gandhi. En el santuario de Tirumala–Tirupati se han hecho importantes esfuerzos de reforestación, rebasando en 2012 los diez millones de árboles plantados. También se ha empezado a ofrecer esquejes de árboles como prasada, los regalos bendecidos, habitualmente dulces, que los peregrinos tradicionalmente reciben del templo y que comparten con familiares y amigos. Esto es un magnífico ejemplo de cómo los intereses ecológicos pueden asimilarse a las más antiguas tradiciones religiosas de manera armoniosa y efectiva. Los grupos de defensa de los derechos de los animales cuentan en India con un importante y lógico apoyo que refleja el gran numero de ciudadanos vegetarianos. Esto ha llevado a que en 2014, India se convirtiese en uno de los primeros países del mundo en legislar siguiendo la Declaración de los Derechos de los Cetáceos producida en 2010 por el Grupo de Helsinki. Este panel de investigadores internacionales declaró científicamente probada una individualidad e inteligencia suficientes en los cetáceos como para justificar una revisión de su estatus legal. Siguiendo estas premisas en India se ha declarado que los delfines (incluyendo orcas y otras subespecies) son personas nohumanas, lo que les garantiza ciertos derechos, impidiendo su caza, venta o comercialización, así como su exhibición tanto pública como privada. Otros de los grupos más populares es el movimiento “Stop Cow Slaughter” específicamente dedicado a la protección de las famosas vacas sagradas y que promueve prohibir su sacrificio y limitar o incluso acabar con su consumo. Este movimiento causa polémica pues si bien las vacas son consideradas sagradas por el hinduismo y son un 26 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.23-40, ISSN 2339-8523 JON ERIC VICARIO ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------motivo central en su mitología e iconografía, a la vez son también un alimento común para otras confesiones. La legislación actual regula el sacrificio pero no su consumo y aunque sus textos legales fueron refrendados en 2005 por la Corte Suprema India su aplicación varia de estado a estado. La prohibición y limitación del consumo es práctica habitual en ciudades sagradas y en ciertos estados como el Gujarat y hay muchas voces que proponen que debería ser así en toda India. En 2015 el estado de Maharastra ha adoptado esta política de prohibición lo cual ha suscitado reacciones, a favor y en contra, en todo el país e incluso enfrentamientos entre activistas y comerciantes. Este movimiento cuenta con un gran apoyo por motivos religiosos y culturales pero también desde los grupos de defensa de los derechos de los animales y de ecologistas, que advierten del impacto de las ganaderías y de los hábitos carnívoros en el entorno. Respetuosa mención merecen los activistas que han llevado a cabo la más larga satyagraha (desobediencia civil pacifica) jamás realizada en India. Durante treinta y tres años un grupo de seguidores del Mahatma Gandhi se ha manifestado diariamente frente a la entrada del matadero de Deonar en Bombay intentando bloquear el acceso al recinto de los camiones que transportaban vacas y toros a su sacrificio. Los activistas eran detenidos a diario por este bloqueo pero en vista del carácter no violento del mismo las autoridades les dejaban retornar a su centro al rato. Esto les permitía retomar su protesta al día siguiente. El miércoles 4 de marzo de 2015, tras la aplicación de la prohibición de sacrificios bovinos en Maharastra, esta satyagraha iniciada en 1982 se ha dado por concluida y su objetivo, si bien lamentablemente tarde según los satyagrahis, cumplido. En términos generales, el “Bhumi Project” es probablemente la más ambiciosa de estas iniciativas. Concebido en 2010 y presentado ante Ban Ki Moon y el Príncipe Felipe de Inglaterra en 2012 con el apoyo de las Naciones Unidas, el proyecto presenta un plan de nueve años sobre tres interesantes ejes: 1. El peregrinaje verde. Esta iniciativa se desarrolla con la ARC (Alliance of Religions and Conservation). En India, el impacto ambiental de las yatras o peregrinajes a lugares santos es a menudo importante, especialmente en lugares naturales como la yatra de la cueva de Amanarth en Cachemira donde recibieron 630 000 yatris en 40 días en 2012. Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.23-40, ISSN 2339-8523 27 ECOLOGÍA Y RELIGIÓN EN INDIA ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------2. Los templos verdes. Las ciudades como Varanasi, donde las yatras son picos en un constante flujo de peregrinos, son igualmente sensibles y se ven cíclica y ecológicamente desbordadas. Los templos y peregrinajes verdes incluyen varias medidas para los devotos como: la restricción del uso del agua en botella, la recogida de la basura propia y ajena, el fomento de agencias de viajes responsables, la provisión para los fieles de comida orgánica cultivada localmente y la concienciación y participación del peregrino en los esfuerzos y actividades de limpieza y mantenimiento del templo. A día de hoy, los templos de Varanasi, Rishikesh, Vishakapatnam, Bridaban y Dwarka forman parte de esta iniciativa y se espera que en breve se les unan Bhubaneswar, Tirupati, Ujjain y Puri. De ser así, la lista incluirá buena parte de los templos más influyentes e importantes de toda la geografía India. 3. La vida compasiva. Este último punto aglutina una serie de actividades para el fomento del vegetarianismo, los productos libres de violencia, trucos y prácticas para celebrar los grandes festivales hindúes de manera “verde”, además de eventos y premios, como la “Semana Anual de la Ecología Hindú” para promocionar los comportamientos e iniciativas ecologistas. El agua es un factor relevante en cualquier país, pero en India es crítico debido a su dependencia endémica de los monzones. Fueron éstos la principal causa de las hambrunas por las que India fue famosa hasta las reformas de principios del siglo XX y la posterior Revolución Verde. Más recientemente se ha calculado que durante el periodo 2008-09 los escasos monzones redujeron alrededor de tres puntos el crecimiento de la economía India, mientras que los efectos de la crisis global en el mismo período fueron mínimos. Quizás consecuentemente, los ríos en India son vistos como madres protectoras, temperamentales y nutrientes que conviene aplacar y cuidar. En esta línea, existe en el sureño estado de Tamil Nadu un festival anual donde se ofrendan antojos a las madresrío. La figura central es la Madre Ganges o “Ganga Ma”, con la cual se identifican, en mayor o menor medida, los otros ríos sagrados. Los ríos juegan además un rol primordial como fuente de purificación a través del baño ritual, donde “la suciedad 28 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.23-40, ISSN 2339-8523 JON ERIC VICARIO ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------moral es lavada por los ríos, que acuden luego a Ganga Ma, el gran purificador, para purificarse ellos mismos” (Narayan, 2001: 192). Por todo esto, el lamentable estado de los ríos en India es quizás uno de los ejemplos más dolorosos de la disociación de principios y prácticas que viven las sociedades modernas. La brecha entre lo que sabemos y lo que hacemos hace que ni los estudios científicos, ni los mandatos directos del dharma puedan prevenir el abuso de los recursos hidrológicos o los comportamientos anti-ecológicos como la contaminación del agua de los ríos con vertidos de residuos industriales y su uso extensivo como letrinas. Pero la contaminación no es siempre el mayor de los problemas. En el caso del sagrado río Yamuna, el 97% de sus aguas son desviadas para su uso agrícola y urbano poco después de salir de las montañas. El caudal, al llegar a Matura y a Agra, está compuesto en su mayoría por los deshechos y aguas residuales de las grandes ciudades, lo que ha llevado a declararlo como río oficialmente muerto desde un punto de vista ecológico. Para los devotos, el estado del sagrado “Yamuna Ji” es aún más doloroso, ya que sus contaminadas aguas son usadas por millones de peregrinos en sus abluciones y en el ungimiento de los ídolos. La falta de alternativas actuales al uso extensivo de sus aguas hace que todo proyecto de regeneración o limpieza sea insuficiente. Sin embargo, existen fuertes alianzas contra este estado de cosas, y varios ejemplos donde ecología y religión están trabajando juntos eficazmente, movilizando recursos e incluso cambiando la conciencia y la perspectiva de la sociedad. En Uttar Pradesh, los seguidores de Iskcon han hecho propia la limpieza de Brindaban, el mítico hogar de Krishna donde este vivió sus amores con Radha en una juventud bucólica infinitamente referida por el arte indio. Ambiciosos y con medios, los devotos intentan restaurar el equilibrio del Yamuna en colaboración con sindicatos de granjeros, grupos de activistas y la ciudadanía en general. A día de hoy, se han conseguido ciertos avances en legislación para evitar vertidos contaminantes en sus aguas y se ha lanzado una campaña para regenerar los Kunds o lagos de Brindaban que, privados de acceso a los ríos, se habían convertido en marismas y vertederos. Pero sobre todo se ha llevado a cabo una movilización que en un gran clamor ha elevado la cuestión a problemática nacional, y se espera que el Yamuna entre oficialmente en el proyecto de rejuvenecimiento del Ganges al ser su principal afluente. Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.23-40, ISSN 2339-8523 29 ECOLOGÍA Y RELIGIÓN EN INDIA ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------En el sur de India, el problema del acceso y calidad del agua es una realidad cada vez más apremiante que conlleva, desde hace años, cruentas revueltas y disturbios, especialmente en torno a la distribución de las aguas del río Kavery. Entre las iniciativas realizadas, destaca, en un ejemplo de los poderosos recursos financieros que los templos y ashrams pueden reunir, el proyecto que el popular gurú Sai Baba financió en solitario junto a sus seguidores y que aseguró el acceso a agua potable a 700 pueblos de Andhra Pradesh. Mención aparte merece el proyecto de protección del tiburón ballena del Gujarat Forest Department y el WTI. Este proyecto necesitaba comunicar y cambiar la perspectiva y la actitud de varios grupos sociales, pescadores, empresarios, turistas y ciudadanos, algo que los grupos ecologistas no habían conseguido por sí solos. En 2004, el proyecto recibió un impulso definitivo cuando se nombró “embajador espiritual” del mismo a Morari Bapu, un reconocido líder espiritual gujarati. Este supo “conectar emocionalmente con las éticas tradicionales y culturales de los locales y de las comunidades de pescadores (…) la enorme respuesta de los jóvenes y escolares aseguró un éxito sin precedentes. Desde entonces, se han rescatado 412 tiburones ballena de las redes” (Menon, 2013). Queda patente, pues, que en India la conciencia religiosa es capaz de influir y concienciar a grandes tramos de la población, así como de reunir recursos humanos y financieros para realizar importantes proyectos transformadores. El origen del campo de la ecologia y religión En 1967, Lynn White observó que la actitud del ser humano respecto a la ecología dependía de “la concepción que se tenía de uno mismo en relación al entorno (…) y de los profundos condicionamientos y creencias sobre nuestra propia naturaleza y destino último, esto es, de la religión” (White, 1967: 3). White criticó duramente los sistemas antropocéntricos de las religiones y culturas monoteístas, y sus consecuencias respecto a la relación de las personas con la naturaleza, haciendo especial hincapié en el cristianismo y su dogma de transcendencia y dominio sobre la naturaleza. El antropocentrismo de origen divino o revelado marcaría el desarrollo del mundo occidental y especialmente la revolución industrial. Estos principios, además, subsisten y se renuevan con los postulados de Descartes, Bacon y Marx cuando formulan la necesidad de dominar y conquistar la naturaleza. Esta visión utilitaria de la naturaleza, 30 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.23-40, ISSN 2339-8523 JON ERIC VICARIO ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------marca todavía hoy en día los paradigmas de desarrollo industrial y económico a nivel global, y es especialmente evidente en los países en vías de desarrollo. En contraposición al antropocentrismo, surgen en la década de los setenta nuevos conceptos teóricos, que podríamos considerar “de laboratorio”. Entre estos cabe destacar el biocentrismo, un sistema que propone el respeto a toda forma de vida y cuyo origen en occidente se remonta a la línea del pensamiento del premio Nobel de la Paz Albert Schweitzer; o el ecocentrismo cuya prioridad es la conservación de las especies por encima de los individuos, incluidos los humanos. “El único sistema de creencias prometedor es el ecocentrismo, definido como un cambio de enfoque y valores del homo sapiens al planeta tierra” (Rowe, 1994: 106-107). Estas consideraciones llevaron a que entre 1996 y 1998 se organizaran en Harvard una serie de diez conferencias con el objetivo de crear un nuevo campo de estudio −sobre las religiones del mundo y la ecología− que asistiera en la tarea de crear nuevas políticas medioambientales. A raíz de estas conferencias se creó el Foro sobre Religión y Ecología de Yale (USA) que daría lugar a la publicación de una colección de ensayos en la revista Daedalus bajo el nombre “Religion and Ecology: Can the Climate Change?”, en lo que pasó a ser una de las primeras discusiones sobre las religiones del mundo y la ética del cambio climático global. A partir del postulado de White, buena parte de la literatura sobre la ecología y la nueva cosmología ha versado sobre la superación de la concepción antropocéntrica del universo (Schweitzer, Rowe, Morín, Vigil, Capra). Sin embargo, para el pensamiento tradicional indio, no ha sido necesario realizar un giro copernicano para superar los conceptos antropocéntricos. La ecología y la concepción india del cosmos El origen de la historia en India se remonta a la Civilización del Indo. Aunque algunos de los rasgos característicos de esta civilización se transmitieron tras su desaparición, no fue así con su carácter marcadamente urbano. Por el contrario, la siguiente etapa de la historia india, la Civilización Védica, a la cual se remontan los axiomas del pensamiento indio, se desarrolló ligada a los bosques que poblaban el Punjab y las orillas del Ganges y del Yamuna en el noroeste del subcontinente. “Rodeada por la vasta vida de la Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.23-40, ISSN 2339-8523 31 ECOLOGÍA Y RELIGIÓN EN INDIA ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------naturaleza, alimentada por ella, vestida por ella, (…) la mente humana comprendió que no existía la soledad absoluta (…) Constatar esta gran armonía entre el espíritu humano y el espíritu del mundo fue el empeño de los sabios de los bosques de la antigua India” (Tagore, 1915:6). Tras la Revolución Cultural que acaeció en China, solo en India se mantiene una continuidad histórica y cultural que ha permitido la transmisión, desde la noche de los tiempos hasta la actualidad, de tradiciones, filosofías e ideales nacidos de una relación más íntima con la naturaleza. A pesar de que estos postulados y sus evoluciones no han sido suficiente garantía de comportamientos ecológicos hoy en día, “una vez limpiado el polvo de los siglos” (Nehru, 1931:15) la tradición india encierra en la actualidad una de las más interesantes, longevas y profundas reflexiones alternativas al antropocentrismo, además de constituir una oportunidad para lograr cambios transformadores en el propio país. De los bosques que arroparon la Cultura Védica surge la simetría actual más importante y aparente entre ecología y la mayoría de las tradiciones ancestrales indias; la concepción del ser humano como parte integrante de un sistema complejo, al cual está íntimamente ligado, ya sea a través de los ciclos de las reencarnaciones, la universalidad del sufrimiento o el reconocimiento de la consanguineidad de la vida en la Madre Tierra. Jainismo: el cosmos viviente El jainismo expone una cosmología con un complejo sistema de estratos y un punto en común a todos ellos: la capacidad de experimentar táctilmente el mundo. Desde la perspectiva jainista del karma, “toda experiencia vital humana incluye otras formas de vida anteriores, bajo la forma de microorganismos, animales, elementales e incluso dioses, resultado del proceso del samsara” (Key Chaple, 2001: 215). Este ciclo, que solo puede detenerse a través de la liberación espiritual –el objetivo de las prácticas jainistas— genera además una visión empática e interconectada de la realidad, con similitudes con la Identidad Planetaria, un concepto moderno que propone una nueva dimensión humana que incluya la visión de que “todas las partes del mundo necesitan ser solidarias dado que enfrentan los mismos problemas de vida y muerte” (Morín, 2005). 32 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.23-40, ISSN 2339-8523 JON ERIC VICARIO ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Esta visión de un “cosmos viviente” jaín que anima el universo, concuerda con la visión del eco-teólogo cristiano Thomas Berry que propone un universo como “una comunión de sujetos más que una colección de objetos” (Berry, 1993: 82). En el contexto del jainismo, esta concepción llevó a la formulación y práctica de la ahimsa, la “no violencia“, y en consecuencia, a un estrictísimo sistema donde el ideal es poder llevar a cabo una vida que no cause daño o violencia ni por acción ni por omisión. Tal y como fue formulado hace más de dos milenios, incluso lanzar una piedra al agua puede ser contrario a la ahimsa y solo debe hacerse si hay buenas razones que justifiquen el someter a la piedra y al agua −con la vida que contienen− a la violencia que infligimos. El jainismo es, quizás por estas razones, la tradición religiosa más simétrica con los modernos preceptos científicos y ecológicos de la “nueva cosmología”. Su filosofía ha sido por esto citada abundantemente, y, sobre todo, sus conclusiones que refieren un respeto total a toda forma de vida, son compartidas por muchos movimientos y filosofías ecológicas. Entre estos están los longevos movimientos a favor de los derechos de los animales, la ética ambiental, la ecología profunda o las citadas visiones ecocéntricas y biocéntricas. El premio nobel Albert Schweitzer consideró sobre la ahimsa que “el establecimiento del mandamiento de no matar y no dañar es uno de los grandes eventos espirituales de la historia de la humanidad”. En su obra “Civilización y Ética” escribió que en su opinión “La ética no es otra cosa que la Reverencia por la Vida (…) el principio fundamental de la moralidad, esto es, que el bien consiste en mantener, asistir y promocionar la vida y que destruir, dañar o dificultar la vida es el mal” (Schweitzer, 1946: xviii). Budismo: la red de Indra y la compasión El budismo llega a la conclusión de la interdependencia de la naturaleza a partir de razonamientos causales. Todas las criaturas sensibles comparten las condiciones de nacimiento, sufrimiento, decadencia y muerte. La realización de esta condición existencial lleva a la conciencia despierta a la compasión por todas las criaturas. Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.23-40, ISSN 2339-8523 33 ECOLOGÍA Y RELIGIÓN EN INDIA ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------La mayoría de los expertos están de acuerdo en que fue el budismo el principal motor para que el vegetarianismo se hiciera popular en India “por puro respeto a las otras formas de vida”, algo único en la historia de la humanidad. Jayadeva Gosvami, poeta devocional del siglo trece, hace referencia a esta influencia en un verso del Sri Dasavatara Strota, “el Canto de las Diez Encarnaciones”, donde el noveno avatar de Visnú, Buda, es descrito como “…Oh Buda del corazón compasionado, tu que denuncias el asesinato de inocentes animales según las reglas y rituales del sacrificio védico”. Entre los conceptos usados por el budismo ecologista destaca la “Red de Indra”. La red se extiende infinitamente y en cada “ojo” de la red encontramos engarzada una sola piedra preciosa de varias facetas. La imagen en cada piedra refleja todas las otras, que a su vez contienen los reflejos de todas las demás. Esta metáfora de la red de Indra ofrece una representación visual de una unidad en la multiplicidad en la cual las partes forman y a la vez contienen el todo, muy en la línea de la concepción compleja de la realidad de Edgar Morin y de las visiones de la Teoría General de Sistemas y de la Física moderna donde “El universo ya no es visto como una maquina y sus partes, sino como un todo indivisible y dinámico cuyas partes están esencialmente conectadas” (Capra, 1982, 35). La red de Indra también ha sido usada “como evocación de un mundo de comunidades ecológicas interconectadas” (Swearer, 1998: 19-22). Los razonamientos jainistas y budistas, en su forma más temprana, llevaron al ministro Kautyla y más tarde al emperador Ashoka Maurya a decretar las primeras legislaciones proteccionistas de las que se tiene noticia. En estas leyes, unos tres siglos antes de la era cristiana, se penaba la violencia ejercida de manera injustificada sobre los animales, se protegían arboles y bosques de su uso indiscriminado e incluso se establecían centros de atención para animales. Hinduismo y conceptos pro-ecológicos El hinduismo en sentido amplio hace suyas las visiones nastikas (heterodoxas) de jaines y budistas pero además cuenta con otras ingentes fuentes de inspiración pro-ecológica en los antiguos Upanishads, las grandes Épicas, los Puranas y las tradiciones Bhakti. 34 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.23-40, ISSN 2339-8523 JON ERIC VICARIO ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Respecto a la interdependencia con la naturaleza, podemos destacar la concepción de Brahman como la realidad suprema subyacente de la cual emanan todas las manifestaciones de la vida como “de un fuego resplandeciente surgen chispas a millares” (Mundaka Upanishad, 2nd Mundaka 1:1). La Madre Tierra es concebida como una manifestación de la Diosa, conocida como Bhumi, Prithvi o Vasudha y es una deidad por derecho propio, en ocasiones presentada como consorte de Visnú “el preservador”. El propio Visnú se concibe como ubicuo a la realidad y es por tanto fuente de respeto por la creación. La creencia en la reencarnación y en los ciclos de renacimiento es también fuente de un sentido de interconexión de la realidad, donde además las acciones respecto a la naturaleza afectan directamente al karma personal, esto es, el cumulo de acciones buenas y malas que determinan nuestro destino en reencarnaciones futuras. En varias comunidades rurales como los Bishnois, Bhils y Swadhyaya se incluye en el concepto del dharma –el deber o conducta adecuada— la protección del medio ambiente como una importante práctica comunal. En estos grupos tradicionales, el término dharma es visto como una relación indisociable o “una combinación de ética (en el mundo humano), ecología (en el mundo natural) y teología (en el mundo espiritual)” (Jain, 2011: 120). La concepción de un dharma holístico es muy cercana a la “ecología profunda” (Naess, 1973) que se ha convertido en una nueva e interesante rama de la filosofía ecológica. Esta tiene como puntos centrales el hecho de que el hombre ha de estar en armonía con el medio, manteniendo la igualdad biocéntrica, esto es, el derecho a existir de todas las formas de vida, y una ética ecocéntrica donde estos derechos del resto de formas de vida están a la altura de los derechos de los seres humanos. Queda patente, pues, que ninguno de estos postulados puede ser considerado como novedoso en India. Sin embargo, tanto los conceptos pro-ecológicos indios como su impacto real en la sociedad del subcontinente deben comprenderse desde la realidad sociopolítica de un país joven, con un pasado de dominación colonial y la consecuente presencia de sistemas y modelos de desarrollo occidentales. Sin olvidar que hablamos de un país en vías de desarrollo, con unos imperativos económicos y sociales que pueden ser vistos tan urgentes o más que el problema ecológico. A esto debemos añadir la famosa heterogeneidad de la mentalidad india, tanto estructural como conceptual, y su Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.23-40, ISSN 2339-8523 35 ECOLOGÍA Y RELIGIÓN EN INDIA ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------característica capacidad de aceptación de la contradicción. Por ejemplo, aunque Bhumi sea una “diosa pro-ecológica”, coexiste con Lakshmi, diosa de la riqueza, quién de hecho goza de mayor jerarquía. También existe la clásica disyuntiva entre dharma “que trata de los comportamientos correctos en la tierra” y moksha “que alienta el desapego de los problemas terrenales” (Narayan, 2001: 200-203). Disyuntiva que aunque aparece zanjada en una fuente tan importante como el sagrado Bhagavad Gita, puede considerarse todavía abierta si “el inequívoco mensaje del Gita se contempla en el contexto más amplio del Mahabharatha, del cual es tan solo una pequeña parte” (Sen, 2005: 4-6). La brecha entre conocimiento y acción Existe una brecha tan importante entre nuestro conocimiento y nuestras acciones, que la sociedad moderna es incapaz de salvarla, al menos con las herramientas y planteamientos actuales. En el caso que nos ocupa, el desafío ecológico, esta brecha se origina ideológicamente en las concepciones antropocéntricas, cartesianas y utilitaristas del mundo; las cuales han impuesto políticamente los paradigmas del desarrollo económico y tecnológico, continuo y sin limites. Frente a esto ninguno de los dos campos, ni la ecología y ni la religión, se bastan solos para poder abarcar la dimensión compleja del problema en sus vertientes planetarias, sociales y personales, y son, por tanto, incapaces individualmente de ser garantes de comportamientos pro-ecológicos. Esto es así porque “Aunque el problema ecológico nos impulsa a cambiar nuestros pensamientos, necesitamos asimismo un impulso interior dirigido a modificar los principios mismos de nuestro pensamiento” (Morin, 2011: 272). Para salvar esta brecha necesitamos un cambio de perspectiva donde el ser humano se reconozca como observador objetivo, esto es, científico en el sentido clásico, y a la vez como parte subjetiva, esto es, interdependiente y compasivo, de una observación que es además dinámica e interconectada. El problema del cambio climático a nivel global y los casos locales como el del río Yamuna guardan una estrecha relación. En ambos se constata un problema de consecuencias críticas, urgentes y ampliamente reconocidas que lleva a realizar un diagnóstico de las causas y soluciones posibles. Sin embargo, en ambos casos se dan elementos económicos, sociales o políticos que imposibilitan no ya la solución del problema, sino incluso el propio reconocimiento de la amenaza. 36 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.23-40, ISSN 2339-8523 JON ERIC VICARIO ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------El establecimiento y desarrollo de un campo de estudios sobre ecología y religión –este ultimo término siempre entendido en su sentido más amplio en India— es especialmente relevante para lograr este cambio de perspectiva, así como para superar un contexto donde los escépticos del cambio climático y los sectores más conservadores de la sociedad están acusando a los científicos y a ecologistas de querer crear una “nueva religión y teología” en un intento “de secularizar, y mermar la influencia de la ciencia, (…) como si se pudiera elegir tu creencia científica” (Kearns, 2007: 111). Pero, como hemos visto, no estamos ante un caso de querer crear una nueva religión, sino ante un claro ejemplo donde las disciplinas originales, la ecología y la religión, se han quedado pequeñas para enfrentar una cuestión que desborda sus campos y dimensiones tradicionales. Pese a las reticencias conservadoras, es alentador comprobar que, para quienes están inmersos en las problemáticas ecológicas y religiosas, las fronteras trans-disciplinarias han empezado a desdibujarse. Así, por un lado, estamos viendo cómo las conclusiones sobre el cambio climático están llevando a la ciencia al campo de la ética y de la moral, a través de las cuales se están generando impacto y cambios individuales y sociales, mientras que a la par numerosas congregaciones religiosas reconocen que “la ciencia que más esta cambiando la conciencia de la humanidad en la actualidad es la nueva cosmología, las ciencias del cosmos y de la naturaleza, todas ellas” (Vigil, 2010), así como que “La explosión científica de los últimos tiempos es, sin duda, una nueva experiencia de revelación” (Berry, 1993). Hoy en día somos testigos de como los actores religiosos indios están así tomando parte de manera decisiva en la lucha contra el desafío ecológico haciéndolo suyo, a la vez que los actores ecológicos a nivel mundial están coincidiendo cada vez más con los conceptos de estas tradiciones no antropocéntricas, incluso adoptando normas de comportamiento similares, como el vegetarianismo y el respeto a la naturaleza y a la vida, frente a una visión puramente utilitaria de la realidad. Conclusiones Las simetrías entre la ecología moderna y los saberes ancestrales indios se originan en el hecho de que comparten objeto de estudio desde un axioma no antropocéntrico. Este objeto de estudio es, por un lado, la naturaleza del ser humano y del cosmos en el que Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.23-40, ISSN 2339-8523 37 ECOLOGÍA Y RELIGIÓN EN INDIA ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------vive, y por otro, la relación entre ambos, para sacar conclusiones sobre los comportamientos deseables y aquellos que hay que evitar. No es, por tanto, extraño y sí muy significativo, que los postulados del biocentrismo y el ecocentrismo abunden o coincidan con la compasión budista y el cosmos viviente jaín respectivamente, o que la concepción dhármica de las antiguas comunidades rurales de Bishnois, Bhils y Swadhyaya sea comparable a la visión holística de la moderna “ecología profunda”. El objeto de estudio común explica, de este modo, las concordancias entre ambos campos y, a la vez, apunta a la necesidad de una visión conjunta y meta-disciplinaria para la comprensión y la acción eficiente con el actual desafío ecológico. Esto es, que para relacionarnos de manera ecológica con nuestro medio ambiente, se deben superar las viejas fronteras cognitivas, donde los campos del saber no comunicaban entre sí, a través de una perspectiva integradora y una educación inter-disciplina y multi-disciplina sobre el ser humano y su entorno. Según Capra “la conciencia ecológica surgirá solo cuando combinemos nuestro conocimiento racional con la intuición por la naturaleza no linear de nuestro entorno” (Capra, 1983, 17). Para lograr esto, la ecología cuenta con dos argumentos que muchas religiones han pretendido históricamente como propios; a saber, la universalidad de su mensaje, que afecta irremediable y materialmente a todos los seres humanos y a la vida misma, y por otro lado la necesaria atención y divulgación que demanda este mensaje. Las tradiciones religiosas y filosóficas por su parte, y especialmente en India, son capaces aún hoy en día de movilizar recursos, personas e incluso ir más allá, cambiando la conciencia individual y la perspectiva social de la propia realidad, a través del crédito y experiencia que acumulan tradicionalmente en materia ética y moral. Casi todas las fuentes disponibles sobre Ecología y Religión advierten que existen límites a este campo y que no es aconsejable sacar de un contexto religioso concreto ideas o principios morales que sostengan las teorías y modelos ecológicos generales. Aunque es evidente que “las contribuciones de cada religión en términos de ética medioambiental tendrán un efecto mayor en su propio contexto y entre sus adherentes”, no es menos cierto que ciertas tradiciones puedan “encarnar principios y prácticas de aplicación más general” (Swearer, 2001: 225). Es en este contexto donde el estudio de las simetrías entre la ecología y los saberes ancestrales puede ser especialmente relevante como medio para identificar candidatos a esta “aplicación más general”. 38 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.23-40, ISSN 2339-8523 JON ERIC VICARIO ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Asistimos hoy a un proceso “eco-logizador” y trans-disciplinar que, acelerado por la globalización cultural y de la información, no debe ser percibido como una amenaza al derecho a la diversidad cultural -el cual es una de la bases de la “ecología profunda”sino como una metamorfosis de los paradigmas cognitivos. Esto es, una nueva perspectiva que supera, y a la vez conserva, lo creado por las múltiples disciplinas, para comprender mejor la complejidad de la naturaleza humana y actuar eficazmente con nuestro entorno. “Debemos ‘eco-logizar’ las disciplinas, es decir, tener en cuenta todo lo que forma sus contextos, incluidas las condiciones culturales y sociales” (Morin, 1999: 127). Estamos en proceso de descubrir las implicaciones que este nuevo mundo dibujado por nuestra historia antigua y nuestra ciencia reciente tiene sobre nosotros a nivel individual y social. En palabras del ya citado Edgar Morin: Nuestra autonomía material y espiritual de seres humanos depende de alimentos culturales, de un lenguaje, de un saber, de mil elementos técnicos y sociales. Cuanto más nos permita nuestra cultura conocer culturas ajenas y culturas pasadas más posibilidades tendrá nuestro espíritu de desarrollar su autonomía. (…) En estas condiciones, puede producirse en nosotros la convergencia de verdades procedentes de los más diversos horizontes: las ciencias, las humanidades, la fe, la ética o nuestra conciencia de vivir en la edad de hierro planetaria (Morin, 2011: 270-272). OBRAS CITADAS BERRY, THOMAS (1993). The Great Work, New York: Bell Tower, 1999. CAPRA, FRITJOF (1996). The Web of Life: A Systems, New York: Anchor Books. ew Scientific Understanding of Living ------------------- (1983) The Turning Point; Science, Society and Rising Culture, New York: Bantam Books. JAIN, PANKAJ (2011). Dharma and Ecology of Hindu Communities: Sustenance and Sustenability, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Ltd. SWEARER, DONALD K (1998). Buddhism and Ecology: Challenge and Promise. Earth Ethics 10 © by the Center for respect of Life and Environment. Adapted for “The ressources of Buddhist Ecology” Daedalus Magazine, American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2001. KEARNS, LAURA (2007). Ecospirit: Religions and Philosophies for the Earth, New York: Fordham University Press. Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.23-40, ISSN 2339-8523 39 ECOLOGÍA Y RELIGIÓN EN INDIA ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------KEY CHAPPLE, CHRISTOPHER (2001). “The Living Cosmos of Jainism: A Traditional Science Grounded in Environtmental Ethics” Daedalus Magazine, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. MENON, VIVEK (2013). “Whale Shark Campaign”, Wildlife Trust of India <http://www.wti.org.in/ProjectsDetails.aspx?ProjId=57> accessed 20 November 2014. MORIN, EDGAR (1999). La tête bien faite. Repenser la Réforme. Réformer la penseé, Paris, Éditions du Seuil. NAES, ARNE (1973). The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement, London, Routledge. NARAYAN, ASUDHA (2001). “Water, Wood and Wisdom: Ecological Perspectives from the Hindu Tradition”, Daedalus Magazine, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. NEHRU, JAWARHALAL (1934),“Glimpses of World History”, New Delhi: Penguin, 2004. ROQUE ALONSE, MARIA ANGELS (2011). “Hacia el pensamiento ecologizado: entrevista a Edgar Morin”, Barcelona: Instituto Europeo del Mediterráneo, IEMed. ROWE, STAN J (1994). “Ecocentrism: the Chord that Harmonizes Humans and Earth”, The Trumpeter, http://www.ecospherics.net/pages/RoweEcocentrism.html accessed 6 January 2015. SÁTIRO, ANGELA (2005). “Pensamiento Complejo y Ecología en acción” Madrid: Revista Iniciativa Socialista, número 75, primavera. SEN, AMARTYA (2005). The Argumentative Indian, Noida: Penguin Books. SCHWEITZER, ALBERT (1946), Civilization and Ethics, London: Adam and Charles Black. TAGORE, RABINDRANATH (1915). Sadhana the Realization of Life”, New York: The Macmillian Company. VIGIL, JOSÉ MARÍA (2010). “Desafío de la Ecología de las Religiones”, artículo parte del número colectivo de revistas latinoamericanas de teología de 2010, animado por la Comisión Teológica Latinoamericana de la ASETT/EATWOT. WHITE, LYNN (1967). “The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis”, Ecology and Religion in History, New York: Harper and Row, 1974. 40 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.23-40, ISSN 2339-8523 Indi@logs Vol 2 2015, pp. 41-54, ISSN: 2339-8523 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------IDIA RIVERS SEE BY THE GREEKS I THE ROMA IMPERIAL PERIOD: FROM GEOGRAPHICAL PRECISIO TO EXOTIC DREAMS CLAIRE MUCKENSTURM-POULLE Université de Franche-Comté [email protected] Received: 29-11-2014 Accepted: 27-01-2015 ABSTRACT The image of Indian rivers given by Greek authors in the Roman imperial period depends on the literary genre they chose : specialists of geography and history like Strabo or Arrian wonder about the reliability of the observations formerly made by the companions of Alexander about the Indus and its tributaries (dimensions, floods, delta, flora and fauna, resemblance to the Nile). A novelist like the pseudo-Callisthenes, and a polemicist like Palladios try, for their part, to amaze their readers with the mirabilia found in the Ganges or in the Tiberoboam. They imagine that their paradisiacal banks offer an ideal living environment to the Brahmans. Keywords: Indus, Ganges, Tiberoboam, Nile, Alexander, Brahmans, marvels, cartography RESUME Los ríos indios vistos por los griegos de la época romana imperial: de precisiones geográficas a sueños exoticos La imagen de los ríos indios que construyen los autores griegos de época romana imperial depende del género literario en el que se expresen : los especialistas de geografía y historia como Estrabón o Arriano se preguntan acerca de la verosimilitud de las antiguas observaciones efectuadas por los compañeros de Alejandro a propósito del Indo y de sus afluentes (sus dimensiones, crecidas, los deltas, su fauna y flora, sus similitudes con el Nilo). Por su parte, un escritor de novela (pseudoCalístenes) y un polemista (Paladio) buscan sorprender a sus lectores recurriendo a las mirabilia relacionadas con el Ganges o el Tiberoboam. Estos ríos paradisíacos son imaginados como el marco de vida ideal para los Brahmanes. PALABRAS CLAVE: Indo, Ganges, Tiberoboam, Nilo, Alejandro, Brahmanes, maravillas, cartografía From the fifth century BC, through the work of the historian Herodotus, the Greeks were aware that there was in India a river that supplied raw fish for the food of the fishermen who lived on its banks, gigantic reeds for their boats, and rushes from which they made their clothes (Histories, 3.98). At the beginning of the fourth century BC, the Greek historian Ctesias, who was a physician at the court of the Persian king Artaxerxes, recorded in his Indika all that he had heard about India. He mentions two rivers: the Indus, which accommodates an immense worm in its waters (Indika, F45.1), and the Hyparchos which INDIAN RIVERS SEEN BY THE GREEKS ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------carries amber (Indika, F45.36). During the years 326–325 BC, the military expedition of Alexander in India gave the Greeks the opportunity to know more about the Indus Basin. Through the testimony of the historians who accompanied Alexander in his oriental conquests, the Greeks were soon aware that in 326 BC Alexander had crossed successively the Indus, the Hydaspes (Jhelum), the Acesines (Chenab), and the Hydraotes (Ravi); that he had reached the banks of Hyphasis (Sutlej) but that his soldiers had forced him to turn back; that he had crossed the Hydraotes and the Acesines again; that with a fleet of 2000 vessels, he had sailed down the Hydaspes, the Acesines, and the Indus; that he had reached Pattala (Hyderabad) in January 325; and that he had decided to go back to Persia in August 325. However, these testimonies by the companions of Alexander have come to us only as fragments—edited by Jacoby (1927) and translated into French by Auberger (2005)—or allusions that we can find in works from the Roman imperial period. Indeed, Alexander’s adventure in India never stopped fascinating Greek writers in the Roman Empire. Through four works of that period, the Geography of Strabo, the Anabasis of Arrian, the Alexander Romance by the pseudo-Callisthenes, and the Letter about the Brahmans by Palladios, all belonging to various literary genres, I will discuss what they retain from older information about Indian rivers and how they completed or distorted it. Let us first look at Strabo's work: this geographer, who lived during the Augustan period (24 BC–14 CE), decided to write a description of the inhabited earth. While he meticulously describes the lands closest to Rome, he deals more quickly with the borders of the world, which were of no immediate political interest for the Roman government. However, he considers that the description of the borders of the world has an intellectual use, because it brings to the men of culture the knowledge that will make them real philosophers. That is why he describes India in the first chapter of the fifteenth book of his Geography. To give a precise idea of this distant country, he prefers not to trust travel accounts by contemporaries of his who had sailed to India. Although he knows that the maritime trade between India and the Western World had increased since the Roman conquest of Egypt (see Geography, 2.5.12 and Young 2001), Strabo is not interested in the practical considerations of traders: For the merchants who now sail from Aegypt by the Nile and the Arabian Gulf as far as India, only a small number has sailed as far as the Ganges; and even these are merely private citizens and of no use as regards the history of the places they have seen. (Geography, 15.1.4) 42 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.41-54, ISSN 2339-8523 CLAIRE MUCKENSTURM-POULLE ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Instead of quoting guidebooks written by uncultured traders who know only a few coastal cities of India, Strabo prefers to resort to the older, more learned works by Eratosthenes, Megasthenes, and the historians who had been companions of Alexander. These authors used Indian rivers to define the limits of India and to structure their description. At first, Strabo refers to the geographer Eratosthenes of Cyrene (3rd century BC) to give the shape of India: it is a parallelogram, the limits of which he can define (see figure 1). Its northern boundaries are the mountains called Caucasus by the Greeks and the Ganges; its western ones are the Indus, while its southern and eastern ones are the outer sea that the Greeks call the Atlantic Ocean. In this simplified view of India, the sea and the rivers play an important role in the definition of space. On one side, the Indus defines the western limit by forming a demarcation line with Ariane (a western region which at the time of Alexander was a part of the Persian Empire); on the other side, the line of the maritime bank serves to clarify the shape of India; the Southern coast follows the parallel of Meroe, with a gigantic cape in the East, advancing southward. To define the Indian space more precisely, Eratosthenes wanted to specify the dimensions of each of the sides of the parallelogram, allowing that each of the greater sides exceeds the opposite side by as much as three thousand stadia, which is the same number of stadia by which the cape common to the eastern and southern coast [i.e. Cape Comorin] extends equally farther out in either direction than the rest of the shore. (Geography, 15.1.11) The western side of India, from the Caucasian Mountains (i. e. the Hindu Kush) to the southern sea is estimated at 13000 stadia. As a stadium is approximately 180 m, the length of the Indus, according to Eratosthenes, would be 2340 km, which is well below its actual length of 3180 km. On the other hand, Eratosthenes is closer to reality when he indicates the southnorth size of the oriental side of India: 16000 stadia, or 2880 km. For its length from west to east in the North, Eratosthenes gives an approximate dimension: indeed, it was possible for him to estimate exactly the first segment of this line from the Indus to Palibothra, because there was a royal road of 10000 stadia (1800 km). The second part, however, from Palibothra to the mouth of the Ganges, is a matter of guesswork, depending on the voyages made on the Ganges from the sea to Palibothra; and this would be something like six thousand stadia. So the total east-west length of India, as a minimum, will be 16000 stadia. As Jacob (1991) noticed, Strabo does not doubt the exactness of these complex calculations of Eratosthenes, which he uses to reduce the complexity of the space described by Megasthenes and the companions of Alexander to a simple geometric form. Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.41-54, ISSN 2339-8523 43 INDIAN RIVERS SEEN BY THE GREEKS ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Secondly, Strabo describes the Indus Basin and the Ganges Basin. To study the Indus area, he relies on the Indica written by Alexander’s companions, which help him to find characteristics common to all the rivers of this basin: they are big and wide, and their waters are fertile. To characterize them better, Strabo borrows from Alexander’s companions the comparison which they made between these rivers and the Nile: both rivers have a regime of big floods. Just as Egypt is “a gift of the Nile” (see Herodotus, Histories 2.5), so the alluvial plains of the Punjab are fertilized by the floods of the Indus and its tributaries. According to the historian companions of Alexander, these floods may be explained by the same meteorological phenomenon of the summer rains that fall on the upstream waters of those rivers. Furthermore, in Egypt and in India the sun increases the fertility of the air, the water and the soil. The double action of the floods and the sun create in both countries a very similar fauna (except for the hippopotamus1). Nevertheless, as the climate of India is wetter than that of Egypt, Indian animals are bigger than Egyptian animals. The florae produced by the Nile and the tributaries of the Indus are similar too, particularly the aromatic plants and the water lenses. That is why Nearchus, the admiral of Alexander’s fleet, states: when Alexander saw crocodiles in the Hydaspes and Aegyptian beans in the Acesines, he thought he had found the sources of the Nile and thought of preparing a fleet for an expedition to Egypt. (Geography, 15.1.25) As Schneider (2004, 38–9) writes, Artaxerxes Ochos thought before Alexander that the Nile had an oriental origin. This Persian king had the project of diverting the course of the Indus, which he thought identical to the upper course of the Nile, with the aim of conquering Egypt (see Liber de inundatione $ili). Alexander probably wanted to sail down the Indus to the Nile. But as soon as he learned from Indians that the Indus did not run into Egypt, but emptied itself into the South Sea by two mouths, he realized his error and gave up his project of a river expedition to Egypt (Geography, 15.1.25). After these general observations, Strabo describes in great detail each of the territories bounded by the rivers of the Punjab. Like the Itineraria navigationis, he enumerates kingdoms, cities, peoples, plants and animals that the Macedonians discovered as they progressed eastwards and then southwards. To spare his readers a boring catalog, Strabo insists on the astonishment of Alexander’s companions when they realized the strangeness of Indian rivers: their banks accommodate an 1 The historian companions of Alexander did not agree about the hippopotamus: “Onesicritus was the only one saying that the hippopotamus is also to be found in India” (Strabo, Geography, 15.1.13) 44 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.41-54, ISSN 2339-8523 CLAIRE MUCKENSTURM-POULLE ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------extraordinary flora and fauna, which gives Strabo the opportunity to describe various types of marvels (thaumata). Some trees are marvels because of their gigantic size: Aristobulus also, where he mentions the Acesines and its confluence with the Hyarotis, speaks of the trees that have their branches bent downwards and of such size that fifty horsemen (according to Onesicritus four hundred!) can pass the noon in shade under one tree (Geography, 15.1.21). Such dimensions probably seemed to be unreal to the readers of Strabo. But there are actually gigantic banyan trees in India. For example, the great banyan, a Ficus benghalensis located in Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose Indian Botanic Garden is the widest tree in the world. The circumference of the original trunk was 1.7 m, and from the ground it measured 15.7 m. The area occupied by the tree is about 1.5 hectare or 4 acres. The present crown of the tree has a circumference of nearly half a kilometer and the highest branch rises to about 25 m. Animals (dogs, elephants, monkeys) observed by the companions of Alexander were also extraordinary in size. Furthermore, they behaved in extraordinary ways; for example, the great apes which the troops of Alexander met between Hydaspes and Acesines behaved like soldiers: once the Macedonians, seeing many of these long-tailed apes (cercopitheces) as in front-line array on some bare hills (for this animal is very human-like in mentality, no less so than the elephant), got the impression that they were an army of men; and they actually set out to attack them as human enemies, but on learning the truth from Taxiles (the king of Taxila), they desisted. (Geography, 15.1.29) The marvel consists here in a confusion between the world of animals and the world of men. Like shy animals, the monkeys should have to run away at the approach of the troops of Alexander. But their physical and intellectual closeness to men inclined them to adopt a behavior suited to the war situation in which they found themselves. Another type of marvel consists in the fact that an animal possesses a quality appropriate to its species to such a degree that it seems to belong to another species. For example, the enormous dogs that Sopeithes (one of the provincial chiefs of the country between Acesines and Hyarotis) had offered to Alexander showed themselves as brave as the lion they had to fight: The match (between the dogs and the lion) having become equal, Sopeithes bade someone to take one of the dogs by the leg and pull him away, and if the dog did not yield to cut off his leg… and the dog suffered the cutting of his leg by slow amputation before he let go his grip. (Geography, 15.1.31) The people who live in the Indus Basin are also characterized by their excesses: for example, the Brahmans that Onesicritus, the pilot of Alexander’s ship, met between the Indus and the Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.41-54, ISSN 2339-8523 45 INDIAN RIVERS SEEN BY THE GREEKS ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Hydaspes, practice an asceticism more rigorous than Cynics in the Greek world. (Geography, 63-65). The Cathaeens who live between the Hydaspes and the Acesines have developed a great liking for beauty: Onesicritus says that they choose the handsomest person as king… and that the men dye their beards with many most florid colors for the sole reason that they wish to beautify themselves. (Geography, 15.1.30) The Greeks, who have beauty and goodness in men (kaloi kagathoi) as an ideal would appreciate beauty too, but not to the same extent as the Cathaeens. These remarks are not only decorative: Strabo also wants to incite his readers to adopt a comparative perspective. When Strabo describes the Ganges Basin, he inevitably has to resort to other sources than the writings of Alexander’s companions. He uses two writers of the Hellenistic period, Megasthenes and Artemidorus. Megasthenes was an ambassador of Seleucos the First at the court of King Sandrocottos (Chandragupta) in Palibothra in the first years of the third century BC. Strabo refers to him to place Palibothra at the confluence of the Ganges and the Erranoboas i.e. the Yamuna (see Geography, 15.1.36). The geographer Artemidorus of Ephesus (who lived at the end of the second century BC) appears to him to be unclear; Strabo uses him nevertheless to say that the Ganges flows down from the Emoda mountains (the Himalayas) towards the south; and that one of its tributaries, the Oedanes, breeds both crocodiles and dolphins. This ecological precision has led historians of geography to think that the Oedanes is the Brahmaputra, the delta of which is invaded by the sea. Besides the Indus and the Ganges, Strabo mentions another river, the Silas, which flows in the extreme north of India. Quoting Megasthenes, he says that the waters of this river may have the magic property of preventing any body from floating. As Karttunen (1989) noticed, this assertion coincides with a scholion of $imiJâtaka 541, v. 424-425: Uttarena nadi sidā gambhirā duratikkamā, Naḷaggivaṇṇā jotanti sadā kañcanapabbatā. ‘Sîdâ’s a river in the north, unnavigable, deep: About it, like a fire of reeds, blaze golden mountains steep, unnavigable, explains the scholiast, “because the water is so delicate, that even a peacock’s feather will not float, but sinks to the bottom.” (transl. Cowell 2014). To conclude his description of India, Strabo stresses the wealth of all the rivers of India: they bring down gold-dust like Iberian rivers (Geography,15.1.69). With this comparison to Spanish rivers, Strabo makes India an El Dorado, the object of many later projects of conquest. 46 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.41-54, ISSN 2339-8523 CLAIRE MUCKENSTURM-POULLE ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Arrian of Nicomedia, who lived in the second century AD, was an important general in the Roman army. In the Anabasis he tells the story of Alexander, from his coming to the throne to his death. Arrian structured the narrative by making the limits of each book correspond with the borders that the Conqueror successively crossed. Thus, the fifth book takes Alexander from Indus to Hyphasis; the sixth book deals with his return to Hydaspes, his descent of it by boat to the southern sea, and his return to Persepolis. This narrative, a retelling of old events, is based on the writings of two companions of Alexander, the engineer Aristobulus and the general Ptolemy. As a good officer who likes the accuracy of military reports, Arrian borrows from his sources all the indications that give a precise idea of Indian topography, and in particular the rivers of the Punjab. Every time the narrative requires precision, he indicates the width of rivers crossed by Alexander and the strength of their current. He also indicates that the Acesines (Chenab) is 15-stade (2.7 km) wide at the point where Alexander crossed it, “that his current is very swift, with great, sharp rocks; the water rushes down over them, billowing and roaring” (Anabasis, 5.20.8). The Hydraotes (Ravi) is as broad as the Acesines but not so swift in current (Anabasis, 5.21.4). It is much easier to cross. For the long river journey to the South, Arrian, basing himself on Ptolemy, indicates the number and shape of the vessels built by Alexander (Anabasis, 6.2.4). He also notes that the Greek pilots had to adapt their navigation technique to the regime of rivers. For example, when they reach the turbulent confluence of the Hydaspes and the Acesines, the steersmen directed the sailors to row as strenuously as possible and get out of the narrows, so that the ships might not be caught in the whirlpools and be capsized by them, but that they should master the eddies of the water by their rowing (Anabasis, 6.5.1) But Arrian does not retain the technical precision of his sources. Furthermore, he is attracted to the human element in the Greek invaders’ adventure. That is why he tries to reconstitute the atmosphere of this Indian campaign. Like a filmmaker creating fictitious documentaries, Arrian describes, for example, the quiet departure for the great sea: there was nothing like the sound of the rowing, with so many ships rowing at one and the same moment, and the shouts of the boatswains giving the time for every stroke, and of the rowers when they struck the foaming water all together and huzza’d. (Anabasis, 6.3.3) As if making the soundtrack of a documentary, Arrian suggests here a contrast with the cacophony of the first crossing of the Hydaspes, a few months earlier, “during the night, when the thunder-claps and the rain counteracted the clatter of the arms and the commotion arising from the commands” (Anabasis, 5.12.3) Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.41-54, ISSN 2339-8523 47 INDIAN RIVERS SEEN BY THE GREEKS ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------However, the experience of the soldiers matters less for Arrian than the character of their leader. Indeed, the accounts of crossing or sailing on the Indian rivers are especially used to emphasize the exceptional qualities of Alexander. The conqueror is at first a remarkable strategist who prepares the crossings of rivers by a meticulous exploration of the topography: for example, he prepares the first crossing of the Hydaspes, noticing a wooded headland that faces a wooded island, “both places being suited to hide the attempt at crossing.” (Anabasis, 5.11.1). Furthermore, Alexander does not hesitate to employ stratagems to deceive the enemy. Before he crossed the Hydaspes, he took the greater part of his cavalry in this and that direction along the banks, with shouts and war-cries. When this had been going on for some time, the Indian king Porus stopped following the directions in which the cavalry moved. So the Indian scouts warned Poros too late when Alexander really crossed the Hydaspes (Anabasis, 5.3.4). Alexander is also an excellent warrior who gives his soldiers an example of great physical courage, often leading the most risky operations: thus he is the first to get to the other side of the Hydaspes (Anabasis, 5.13.2). Alexander thus takes risks for himself, but on the other hand he knows also how to protect the lives of his men: he saved the survivors among the sailors who had been shipwrecked in the confluence of the Hydaspes and the Acesines (Anabasis, 6.5.4). Alexander wants to be on good terms with his soldiers. He also wants to be on good terms with the gods. That is why he offers to his gods a propitiatory sacrifice every time the crossing of a river looks dangerous (before crossing the Indus in Anabasis, 5.3.6.; before crossing the Acesines again in Anabasis, 5.29.5) and a sacrifice of thanksgiving each time he safely arrives on the other bank (for example in Anabasis, 5.20.1). When he reaches the edge of Hyphasis, the negative judgment of the soothsayers after examination of the sacrificial entrails corresponds, as if by magic, to the refusal of the Macedonian soldiers to go further east (Anabasis, 5.28.4). Alexander can thus order his army to turn back without losing face. As Bosworth (1995) says in his commentary, Arrian uses the historian companions of Alexander to make his account credible and lively. He paints the laudatory portrait of a fearless conqueror who regards the Indian rivers sometimes as obstacles, sometimes as good ways to travel. In the third century CE, an anonymous writer called the pseudo-Callisthenes composed in Alexandria The Life and Deeds of Alexander of Macedon, a fictionalized biography we call the recensio vetusta of the Greek Alexander Romance. The conquest of India is treated in eight chapters of the third book, a small space compared with the 126 chapters of the whole 48 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.41-54, ISSN 2339-8523 CLAIRE MUCKENSTURM-POULLE ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------romance. For the Indian episode, the pseudo-Callisthenes follows approximately the chronological order, but local or temporal precision does not matter to him. The only Indian river he mentions by name is the Hydaspes: “It runs into the countries of the East governed by a very powerful king” (Greek Alexander Romance, 3.4). The novelist mistakes here the Hydaspes, at the bank of which Alexander defeated Poros, for the Hyphasis, beyond which his troops refused to follow him; furthermore, the sovereign about whom he speaks seems to be the powerful king of Maghada who reigned over the high valley of the Ganges, was capable of mobilizing an immense army, and frightened the Macedonian troops. In spite of the historical reality, the novelist asserts that Alexander decided to campaign against this powerful king. But Alexander is wounded when attacking a city, which incites him to give up the conquest. From that moment, he wants rather to discover the curiosities of India. He writes a long letter about them to his former teacher Aristotle 2 (Greek Alexander Romance, 3.17 i. e. Supplement I in the translation of Stoneman 1991). This letter breaks the linearity of the account, but it allows the novelist to accumulate marvel upon marvel. Alexander says he saw a city built on stilts of bamboo in the middle of a river. The soldiers wanted to drink the water of the river, but it was more bitter than hellebore. According to some commentators, this is characteristic of non-Indian rivers, notably salty rivers of the Touranian plain (see Bounoure, Appendix 1, note 27). All buildings of the city were made from bamboo. The city itself was hidden by immense bamboo walls and defended by bamboo dugouts which recalled the dugouts of reeds already mentioned by Herodotus. A few soldiers of Alexander tried to swim to this extraordinary city, but hippopotami came and seized the men. Therefore, the pseudoCallisthenes superimposed different images of exotic rivers to invent a strange river, very protective towards the natives and very hostile towards the foreigners. But this episode of the forbidden river city is also the result of the crossing of various literary genres. Historical and real ethnographic data may be the starting point: it may well be that Alexander really saw on the bank of an Indian river a city of fishermen, built on piles. From these data, the pseudo-Callisthenes developed a wonderful universe where the river city becomes a forbidden city defended not only by human sentinels, but also by hippopotami who are almost as terrible as the monstrous man-eaters of the Homeric epic. This poikilia (variegation) is typical of the Greek novel. 2 There were several letters of Alexander to Aristotle in the Greek world; either as independent papers, or included in the various versions of the Alexander romance. Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.41-54, ISSN 2339-8523 49 INDIAN RIVERS SEEN BY THE GREEKS ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Palladios, who lived from 363 CE to 431 CE) was a Christian monk, and later the bishop of Helenopolis in Bythinia, in the North-West of modern Turkey. He wrote at the end of the fourth century a letter On the Peoples of India and the Brahmans, which under the mask of exoticism was a way for him to denounce bad Christian monks. This letter consists of two parts: in the first one, Palladios admits he has not gone personally to the country of the Brahmans, which he locates not far from India and from China, along the Ganges. He specifies that the Ganges is a river which is called in the Bible the Phisôn, “one of the four rivers which were gushing from paradise” (On the Peoples of India and the Brahmans, 1.1). Palladios probably found this equivalence between the Ganges and the Phisôn in the Antiquities of the Jews of Josephus. The Jewish historian of the first century CE actually wrote that “the Phison, which denotes abundance, running into India, makes its exit into the sea and is by the Greeks called Ganges” (Antiquities of the Jews 1.3). By this biblical allusion, Palladios suggests that the banks of the Ganges are somehow paradisiacal. Palladios then describes the country of the Brahmans, using the testimony of a contemporary lawyer, a native of Thebes in Egypt, who stayed for a long time at Taprobane (Sri Lanka) and in India. According to this lawyer, the Brahmans live naked near the river. They possess nothing, spend their time praying, and live on food gathering and fresh water. The male Brahmans live on the bank of the river which is near the Ocean, the female Brahmans on the bank which borders on India. Nevertheless, the male Brahmans cross the river in the summer and stay for forty days with their wives to have children (On the Peoples of India and the Brahmans, 1.11-13). The Ganges thus plays an important role in birth control and in the demarcation of the territories which belong to each gender of Brahmans. To insist on the bordering function of the river, the Theban lawyer indicates that the Ganges is extremely difficult to cross, because it is infested with odontotyrannoi, who are monstrous amphibians (perhaps gharials?3) capable of gobbling up an elephant. But luckily these monsters leave the river when the Brahmans visit their wives. The banks of the Ganges also accommodate snakes 70 cubits long, big ants, huge scorpions, and crowds of elephants. Although the Theban lawyer probably never read the historian companions of Alexander, he resorts to the same clichés about the harmfulness and hugeness of the Indian fauna. Palladios organizes the second part of his letter as a dialog between Dandamis, leader of the Brahmans, and Alexander. This dialog refers to the testimony of Onesicritus, but in a very 3 The gharial (gavialis Gangeticus) is one of the longest of all living crocodilians, measuring up to 6.25 m, but it is fish-eating. 50 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.41-54, ISSN 2339-8523 CLAIRE MUCKENSTURM-POULLE ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------indirect way, being content with recalling that Onesicritus was Alexander's emissary. In the dialog of Palladius, Dandamis contrasts the unlimited ambition of the Conqueror with the wisdom of the Brahmans. These wise men know how to content themselves with little, are on a vegetarian diet, and drink only the pure water of a river which Dandamis calls Tiberoboam. Tiberoboam is probably a corruption of Erannnoboas, which Megasthenes named as the main tributary of the Ganges (see Arrian, Indica 4.3 and 10.5). Filliozat (1986) thinks that Erannoboas is the Tungabena in the Decan. Desantis (1992, 60 n44) suggests identifying this river with the Ghagra, a tributary on the left side of the Ganges. Dandamis contrasts his extreme sobriety to the taste for luxury shown by Calanos, the bad Brahman who did not hesitate to leave the banks of Tiberoboam to follow Alexander to Persia (On the Peoples of India and the Brahmans, 2.4). Palladios thus uses the figure of Calanos to chastise the bad monks who give up their vows to return to the profane world. Dandamis, on the contrary, represents the good monk: by drinking “the water of wisdom” of the Tiberoboam, he attains the wisdom of a life lived in sobriety and conformity to nature. Thus, the Ganges and the Tiberoboam form an exotic and a symbolic decor in the Letter about the Brahmans: they entertain the reader with their marvelous fauna, but they suggest at the same time that paradise can only be found in renunciation. To conclude, the information given by our four writers of the Roman imperial period obviously depends on their literary project. The geographer Strabo and the historian Arrian follow closely the companions of Alexander to give precise details on Indian rivers. The novelist pseudo-Callisthenes and the polemicist Palladios make them an exotic decor and a reservoir full of marvels. But all insist on the strangeness, the immensity and the dangerousness of the rivers of the “Far-East”: so they were developing clichés which were to continue after antiquity. WORKS CITED ARRIAN, Anabasis Alexandri, Books 5-7, transl. by BRUNT, PETER ASTBURY (1983), The Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, William Heinemann Ltd. AUBERGER, YANNICK (2005), Historiens d’Alexandre, collection Fragments, Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.41-54, ISSN 2339-8523 51 INDIAN RIVERS SEEN BY THE GREEKS ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------BOSWORTH, ALBERT (1995), Commentary on Arrian’s History of Alexander, vol.2, Oxford: Clarendon Press. COWELL, EDWARD B. (2014), new ed., The Jâtaka or Stories of the Buddha’s Former Births, vol.6, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 55-6. CTESIAS, La Perse. l’Inde. Autres fragments, ed. and transl. by LENFANT, DOMINIQUE (2004), Collection des Universités de France, Paris: Les Belles Lettres. FILLIOZAT, JEAN (1986), L’Inde vue de Rome, Paris: Les Belles Lettres. HERODOTUS, Histories, vol. 2, transl. by GODLEY, ALFRED DENIS (1921), The Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, William Heinemann Ltd. JACOB, CHRISTIAN (1991), Géographie et ethnographie en Grèce ancienne, Paris: Armand Colin. JACOBY, FELIX (1927), Die Fragmente der Griechischen Historiker, II B; II D, Berlin: Weidmann. JOSEPHUS, The Jewish Antiquities, vol. 1, transl. by THACKERAY, HENRY ST. JOHN (1930), The Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, William Heinemann Ltd. KARTTUNEN, KLAUS (1989), India in early Greek literature, Helsinki: the Finnish Oriental Society. PALLADIOS, I genti dell’ India e i Brahmani, transl. by DESANTIS, GIOVANNI (1992) Roma: Città nuova. PSEUDO-CALLISTHENES, Le Roman d’Alexandre, transl. by BOUNOURE, GILLES (1992), coll. La roue à livres, Paris: Les Belles Lettres. --------------------------, The Greek Alexander Romance, transl. by STONEMAN, RICHARD (1991), London: Penguin Books. SCHNEIDER, PIERRE (2004), L’Ethiopie et l’Inde. Interférences et confusions aux extrémités du monde antique,Rome: Ecole française de Rome. STRABO, Geography, vol. 1 and 7, transl. by JONES, HORACE, LEONARD (1966), The Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, William Heinemann Ltd. YOUNG, GARY KEITH (2001), Rome’s Eastern Trade: International Commerce and Imperial Policy, 31BC-AD305, London: Routledge. 52 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.41-54, ISSN 2339-8523 CLAIRE MUCKENSTURM-POULLE ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.41-54, ISSN 2339-8523 53 INDIAN RIVERS SEEN BY THE GREEKS ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 54 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.41-54, ISSN 2339-8523 Indi@logs Vol 2 2015, pp. 55-71, ISSN: 2339-8523 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------REPOSSESSIG ISLAM: AFFECTIVE IDETITY AD ISLAMIC FUDAMETALISM I HAIF KUREISHI ANDREAS ATHANASIADES University of Cyprus [email protected] Received: 28-08-2014 Accepted: 21-12-2014 ABSTRACT The present article argues that the processes which seem to have spawned the contemporary generation of British jihadists started in 1980s Britain, when Thatcherite practices led to the rise of racism and the suppression of dissident voices, a by-product of which was the disassociation of Muslim immigrants from the host society. The result was that the next generation of immigrants was much more prone to religious violence, attracted as it was towards the supposedly- stable sense of identity offered by Islamic fundamentalism. The issue of identity of British Muslim immigrants is examined by revisiting Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album (1995), whose narrative representations open up spaces in the British cultural landscape to intentionally include the marginalised and disenfranchised. The hypothesis is that the essentialist choice faced by his characters within the conflictual context generated by the clash of Islamic fundamentalism and sexual liberation is similar to the one diasporic subjects face today. The argument is that the process of thinking about identity in affective terms, based on the theories of the likes of Brian Massumi and Deleuze and Guattari, gestures towards a new way of addressing questions of belonging for diasporic subjects, which can have a profound effect on the perception of issues such as religious fundamentalism and social integration. KEYWORDS: Islamic Fundamentalism; British Muslims; Immigrants; Diasporic Identities; Affect; Desire La recuperación del islam: la identidad afectiva y el fundamentalismo islámico en la obra de Hanif Kureishi RESUME El presente artículo sostiene que los procesos que parecen haber dado origen a la generación contemporánea de yihadistas británicos se iniciaron en la Gran Bretaña de los años ochenta, época en la que las prácticas tatcherianas condujeron al incremento del racismo y a la supresión de las voces disidentes, lo cual dio como resultado la disociación de los inmigrantes musulmanes de la sociedad que los acogió. En consecuencia, la siguiente generación de inmigrantes mostró una mayor propensión a la violencia religiosa y al, presuntamente estable, sentido de identidad que ofrecía el fundamentalismo islámico. El problema de identidad de los inmigrantes musulmanes británicos se examina mediante una nueva revisión de la obra The Black Album de Hanif Kureishi (1995), cuyas representaciones narrativas abren espacios en el ambiente cultural británico para incluir de manera intencional a los marginados y privados de derechos civiles. La hipótesis consiste en que la elección esencialista a la que se enfrentan los REPOSSESSING ISLAM ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------personajes dentro del contexto conflictual generado por el choque del fundamentalismo islámico con la liberación sexual es similar a aquella a la que los individuos de la diáspora se enfrentan en la actualidad. El argumento sostiene que el proceso de pensar en la identidad en términos afectivos, basándose en las teorías de los afectos de Brian Massumi y Deleuze y Guattari, muestra una nueva manera de abordar los interrogantes sobre la identidad nacional de los individuos de la diáspora, la cual puede tener un profundo efecto en la percepción de problemas tales como el fundamentalismo religioso y la integración social. CLAVE: fundamentalismo identidades de la diáspora; afecto; deseo PALABRAS islámico; musulmanes británicos; inmigrantes; The Affective ature of Identity It seemed to me that [...] younger kids would be interested in what I was interested in: Bhangra music, pop culture, all that stuff. But they had completely rejected all of that, and I was really shocked, because those kids were as English as me. They were born and raised in England, yet they rejected the West. They hated it. Boys from Birmingham were burning books by Muslim writers who were making fun of Islam. This wasn't some ancient tradition. I mean, there are all kinds of liberal ideas in the Muslim tradition, anyway. Pretending that this fundamentalism was the only Islam was definitely a modern thing. A kind of repossession of Islam (Hanif Kureishi, in Amitava, 2001:127-128). Undeniably, the dynamics of sexual identities in Britain during the last three decades have not been thoroughly examined, especially since the basic contention for addressing questions of belonging has been the issue of race. I argue that such a limited scope for defining identity, especially pertaining to the Muslim South Asian Diaspora in Britain, has led to violent expressions on both sides, what with the emergence of neo-Nazi movements such as the National Front in the 1980s and the religious violence in London in 2005 and today in Syria and Iraq. One of the reasons for such culminations is the inability or unwillingness of the host society to properly understand the complexity and polyvalent nature of identity and sense of belonging in second- and third-generation immigrants in Britain from the 1980s until this very day. It has been argued that the feelings of alienation and disassociation certain diasporic subjects experience today, a situation that reflects that of previous generations of immigrants, has led to a longing for a coherent sense of identity in Islamic fundamentalism, which functions as a refuge for people (Malik, 2009, From Fatwa to Jihad). If we are to interrogate such hegemonic discourses on the formation of identities in Britain then, we would have to move away from seeing race as the only marker for identity, which is the scope of the present article. Instead, I argue, we can turn towards the affective nature of identity and towards 56 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.55-71, ISSN 2339-8523 ANDREAS ATHANASIADES ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------a re-imagining of desire. Such a re-imagining functions as a means of disrupting ongoing discussions on identity and the nation, which is what the British-born author Hanif Kureishi -himself a second-generation immigrant from the Indian subcontinentdid in his fiction on the very subject of fundamentalism some 20 years ago. A need to retrospectively examine his characters’ affective choices arises then (like Shahid in his 1995 novel The Black Album), vis-a-vis fundamentalism and sexual liberation, as their dilemmas reflect similar ones British Muslims are faced with today. If we manage to do so, the basic contention becomes that if postcolonial literature becomes more socially aware, it can gesture towards a new perspective on the complexity of diasporic identity/ies, one that takes into consideration the unsung affective aspect. At the same time it would also underline the possibilities of challenging seemingly uniform spaces by subverting traditional understandings of the nation and ideas of belonging in Britain, as affective terms are used to re-imagine such concepts. Such an outcome would underline Kureishi’s significance as a cultural instigator and hence, as still an influential contributor to contemporary culture, while at the same time providing us with insights into how the need to define oneself became inextricably linked not with race but with religion, as the horrible events we bear witness to today in the Middle East illustrate. In effect, if we are to understand the threat modern-day transnational jihadism and especially a Western-bred one poses to peace and security, we have to go back to the beginning. I argue that a more didactic nature of literature then can -and must- have a significant role in that. But exactly how can an affective re-imagining of identity in literature have any social meaning and real-life application? In other words, how can fantasy affect reality? Jacques Derrida’s notion of desire pertains to a state of lacking (something), so when one eventually obtains that which one did not have but had longed for, desire ceases to be a “lack” and therefore, it is not a desire anymore; by its very nature then, desire is unattainable and unrealisable. It is important to note the connection between desire and society here, as desire is already invested in social formation, which is what creates that interest; in turn, that which creates the sense of lacking. Insofar as I am interested in the way desire actually produces reality, and moving beyond the psychoanalytic view of desire as “lack”, for the purposes of this article I put forward a different view based on Deleuze and Guattari’s idea in Anti-Oedipus, that “lack” should not be identified with 57 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.55-71, ISSN 2339-8523 REPOSSESSING ISLAM ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------desire; rather desire constitutes production in the social field. Deleuze and Guattari analyse the ways in which desire is inextricably intertwined to reality and in particular, to capitalist society, addressing questions pertaining to history, society and human psychology: for them desire, in its anarchic state, produces reality. I specifically read desire then, as a subliminal power that has revolutionary qualities and, therefore, social and political potential, exactly because of its amorphous nature and, therefore, its inability to be categorised. Sara Upstone has argued in “A Question of Black or White” (2008), that if theoretical texts and images such as novels and films, were read in the wake of their direct social engagement with the real world, then the alienation and disaffection of certain communities within a host society might have been addressed earlier; I argue that this can be done specifically if we focus on the affective nature of that social engagement which pertains to questions of belonging. To move this idea further, I attempt a coming together of the theories on desire of Deleuze and Guattari and Brian Massumi; indeed this anarchic state of desire can be explained by bringing the concept of affect into the discussion. In Parables for the Virtual, Brian Massumi argues that affect is a non-conscious experience of intensity, a moment of unformed and unstructured potential which is anarchic and therefore not limited (2002: 30). It is my belief that not despite, but because of this anarchic state of desire, a space of possibilities vis-a-vis identity especially for socially marginalised groups, such as British Muslims, is opened up. It is true that there is a dialectical process between desire and sexuality in Hanif Kureishi. Based on such a reading of desire then, I read sexuality as not limited to the interaction of female and male roles; rather, I put forward –similarly to my reading of the concept of desire–, a sense of multiplicity that sexuality creates through the production of reality. Sexuality is not, by any means binary in the sense that it is limited to the sexual act between heterosexual gender-opposites. On the contrary, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, “making love is not just becoming as one, or even two, but becoming as a hundred thousand…we always made love with worlds” (1972: 296). If we are to contextualise the aftermath of the dialectical processes such issues are engaged in within historical, societal and political frames, it can be demonstrated that “there are no desiring machines that exist outside the social machines that they form on 58 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.55-71, ISSN 2339-8523 ANDREAS ATHANASIADES ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------a large scale; and no social machines without the desiring machines that inhabit them on a small scale” (1972: 340). Desire is a machine connected to another machine which is the object of desire; thus, to the extent that the desiring production can be socially generated, I attempt to unravel the implications behind its different manifestations within the social realm, focusing on the issue of identity. What is made evident today is that the manifestation of Islamic fundamentalism -and consequently Islamophobia- emphasises the lack of coherence and unity of the idea of a black community (Desai, 2004: 65) which is why we should examine whether there can be a sense of diasporic identity that pertains to affective terms, stemming from its unformed and unstructured matrix. Hanif Kureishi’s preoccupation with issues such as Islamic fundamentalism points to a social aspect of postcolonial literature which embodies a post-ethnic reality that no longer solely pertains to race in addressing questions of belonging. Sara Upstone argues that The Black Album constitutes such “a central text for a more socially aware, materially concerned, and politically engaged postcolonialism” (6). Such a revisiting of the aesthetic and social characteristics of literature based on a retrospective examination of Kureishi’s work can provide useful insights for the new nature of the relationship between the two, effectively increasing the importance of desire which rises as a viable alternative to a hitherto largely racially defined identity, all the while moving religious fundamentalism into the spotlight. We are then called to understand the notion of contemporary nation and consequently national identity as a “post-racial space of linkages, synchronicities and equivalences that far surpasses the solipsism of cultural diversity, racial difference or narrow national exclusivity” (McLeod 48). In hindsight then, Kureishi’s post-1990 work can be situated within what McLeod has called “contemporary black writing” (2010: 45), a kind of writing that no longer pertains exclusively to race. “From Fatwa to Jihad” The results of our indifference towards the real-world connotations of imaginative pieces of writing culminated in the most horrific way, namely in the active participation of third-generation British immigrants (like, Mohammed Emwazi, the British jihadistexecutioner nicknamed “Jihadi John”) in the most brutal regime of our time, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Currently, according to the Economist, around 600 59 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.55-71, ISSN 2339-8523 REPOSSESSING ISLAM ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Britons have gone to fight with the Islamic State and most of them are disillusioned or disturbed when they return. The British government has initiated a de-radicalisation program called Channel, which aims to divert people from extremism. The same process is followed in Denmark, where the thinking behind counselling returning jihadists is that the young men who went to fight in Syria and Iraq were people with few prospects who did not feel welcome in Danish society, a process Kenan Malik agrees with and points out that the same happened in Britain (From Fatwa to Jihad, 2009). I argue that their actions can be attributed -albeit to a point as the process of becoming a fundamentalist is of course a highly complex one to be attributed to a single cause- to a social estrangement from their host society, the traces of which we bore witness to in the early 1990s with the radicalisation in British mosques. It is true that the Thatcher decade left a lot of people angry, discontented and detached; British Muslims more so than others. Thus, as they started seeking a stable sense of identity elsewhere, the nature of a new struggle was underlined and new complexities started to arise. This shift was noticed by Kureishi after doing research in London mosques, and The Black Album was the result of his work. However, not only were Kureishi’s new preoccupations not taken seriously but, on the contrary, because he did not deal with Thatcher anymore, certain concerns were raised by critics such as Mahmood Jamal and Ruvani Ranasinha who, in “Dirty Linen” (1988) and Hanif Kureishi (2001) respectively, lamented the aesthetic decline of the author and challenged his political status. It can be argued, however, that even though it might be true that Kureishi’s later work did not have the same allure as the aesthetic levels of My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) or The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), the addressing of social issues such as religious violence underlines the shifting importance of religion in questions of belonging in 1990s Britain and indeed, in today’s world. Thus, the unravelling of the nature behind the interaction between the aesthetic and the political qualities of a novel, as well as the extent to which this interaction pertains to society at large, must be the scope of such a revisiting. Even though one cannot argue that Islamic identity politics started with the Rushdie affair, it can be said that the fatwa against the author caused the ensuing rage, feelings of discontent and religious fervour to surface. The fatwa against Salman Rushdie, who was a close friend of the author, shocked Kureishi: 60 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.55-71, ISSN 2339-8523 ANDREAS ATHANASIADES ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------It changed the direction of my writing. Unlike Salman, I had never taken a real interest in Islam. I come from a Muslim family. But they were middle-class – intellectuals, journalists, writers– very anti-clerical. I was an atheist, like Salman, like many Asians of our generation were. I was interested in race, in identity, in mixture, but never in Islam. The fatwa changed all that. I started researching fundamentalism. I started visiting mosques, talking to Islamists (In Malik, 2009, “Kureishi on the Rushdie Affair”). What he found amazed him. He could not understand why these people, born and raised in the West, hated their country so much. In an interview to Mick Brown, he expresses his disgust at what he found, labelling the people there as: ...fascists. Vile. Horrible. You’d want to have a bath afterwards. And the hatred of the West, unspeakable. I mean I hated the West, too, I hated imperialism and all the bad things. But this was a vicious hatred and a deep feeling of violence that was unspeakable. And it’s an attack on everything I love – liberal values, free speech, the whole thing (Brown, 2011). It is understandable then that this more concerned Kureishi who started considering issues that proved to have a tremendous effect on British society in the future. It could be argued that the strong feelings created by his research that clearly imbued his later work, the connotations of which are the aims of this retrospective examination. Kureishi knew that touching upon religious issues was not at all an easy undertaking, but it was a battle he was prepared to fight. Indeed, he believed that his examination of fundamentalism in Britain would create tension, but it was an argument worth having. In an interview with MacCabe, he says: I don’t like fundamentalists, and fundamentalists don’t like writers. So you know, there is going to be a kind of animosity between us from the start. But it’s an argument worth having and it is worth engaging with the fundamentalists. And I would want them to engage with me too. But it’s difficult. But I try (2004: 43). Such a preoccupation with the contemporary realities of Britain in the 1990s is what led Bart Moore-Gilbert to argue that Kureishi’s work can be located particularly within “the condition of England” genre (2002: 110); this statement is true even more so today because the British jihadists are a reflection of the condition of England today. It is true that Kureishi has always been interested in the relationship between the real nature of people and their ideologies -be it cultural, political or religious-, which are props in the identity game, as they all require a measure of conformity. Fundamentalism, with its narrow, monocultural worldview, is nothing if not an extreme ideology. Kureishi looked into it from a political perspective, underlying that his shift of focus from Thatcherism to Islamic fundamentalism was not as disparate as some people may have thought: 61 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.55-71, ISSN 2339-8523 REPOSSESSING ISLAM ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------“Islam is rather like Thatcherism. It’s an intoxicating force to test yourself against” (Qtd in Eberstadt, 1995: 118). This goes on to testify to the fact that Kureishi shifted his focus after the loss of the political conflict of the 1980s which inspired him and informed his work, towards this new order that was created in the post-Thatcherite years, contextualised by religion. In that, a new space was created, in which conflicts were still created and Kureishi manifested desire in a way so as to compensate for the limiting perspective of Islamic fundamentalism. It is important to note, however, that Kureishi’s critique was not directed at religions in general. Rather, he was more preoccupied with the extreme version of religions, which affected the identity formation process in Britain. Indeed, even though he believed that religions are, in reality, illusions, he recognised at the same time their importance: You can’t ask people to give up their religion; that would be absurd. Religions may be illusions, but these are important and profound illusions. But they will modify as they come into contact with other ideas. This is what an effective multiculturalism is: not a superficial exchange of festivals and food, but a robust and committed exchange of ideas – a conflict which is worth enduring,rather than a war (2005: 100). In effect then, Kureishi reads multiculturalism not in the way it has been celebrated but in a way that is closer to its true nature, as he sees possibilities in religions but only when they come into contact with other ideas, something that fundamentalism, by definition, rejects. One such idea is the manifestation of desire and sexuality in his characters in works such as The Black Album. During his research for this novel and the short story “My Son the Fanatic” (1994), Kureishi discovered that, along with sexual pleasure, young British fundamentalists had also rejected other kinds of pleasures, so familiar to him. So the question becomes: how can this relationship be transformed by affective terms, so that it does not function unequally? The answer can be found, I argue, in looking at the possibilities that a sense of an affective nature of diasporic identities can offer, especially as a way out of the limits of religious fundamentalism. This is how desire, in the possibilities it offers because of its anarchic state, can produce reality, in offering a “way out” for those thirdgeneration immigrants who refuse to either be totally assimilated by their host nation which would eradicate their identity- or be totally dissociated from it, which can lead to violence, either domestic or international. 62 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.55-71, ISSN 2339-8523 ANDREAS ATHANASIADES ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Revisiting The Black Album Kureishi’s The Black Album (1995) engages directly with the Rushdie Affair, even though Salman Rushdie is not named in the book at all. The issue of Islamic fundamentalism is looked at through the lens of desire and sexuality, and as we identify the implications behind their interaction, we realise Kureishi’s significance in keeping up with –or, some might argue, in being ahead of– the times. Indeed, it is argued that the dilemma Shahid Hassan (the protagonist) is faced with and the ramifications of his choice, reflect the choice many third-generation immigrants face today vis-a-vis questions of belonging and the dangers of being assimilated in the rubric of Islamic fundamentalism, which inevitably leads to violence. The Black Album follows Shahid’s oscillating desire for Riaz, the leader of a local Islamist group, and for Deedee Osgood, his sexually liberated teacher. It narrates an intersection of the social realm and especially its rising religious fundamentalism and sexual desire. Sex, drugs and pornography are paraded for the audience through the relationship between Shahid and Deedee. Their relationship testifies to how Shahid accepts the fluid nature not only of his own self but of society at large, through his own erotic alteration. The conflict comes with the juxtaposition of sexual abstinence, in Riaz’s group, and a hedonistic lifestyle in Deedee, with Shahid caught between them. He is drawn to both of them and the novel culminates in what is Shahid’s final moment of decision, which comes when Riaz’s group organises a burning of Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses (albeit not named) on campus. In this scene, Kureishi shows the final clash of sexual expression and religious violence, as I maintain that the two are, in fact, much more correlated than we may have thought. Abstinence from sexual pleasure, advocated by fundamentalists, can lead the repressed to violence while sexual expression can be seen as an alternative system to religious, limiting views of the world. And it seems that the burning of the book is a failure of imagination instead of a triumph of religion in that it is not Islam that emerges victorious from that scene; rather it is a testimony to the complex nature between religious violence and desire. At first, Shahid is torn, trying to find his identity between the pleasures afforded to him by the culture he lives in, embodied in the sexually adventurous relationship with Deedee, and the religious fervour and denial of pleasure by the charismatic Riaz. Riaz 63 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.55-71, ISSN 2339-8523 REPOSSESSING ISLAM ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Al-Hussain, the strong leader of the Islamic student group, fascinates Shahid, as he has a new sense of identity to offer to the troubled young man, much like second- and thirdgeneration Muslim immigrants found a stable sense of identity in religious fundamentalism, something that can be marked down as a failure of their host society to offer the same: These days everyone was insisting on their identity, coming out as a man, woman, gay, black, Jew – brandishing whichever features they could claim, as if without a tag they wouldn’t be human. Shahid, too, wanted to belong to his people (1995: 34). In sharp contrast to the strict Islamic way of life, Kureishi positions the hedonistic and fetishistic Deedee, whose sexual connection with her student comes into clash with Islamic beliefs. There are two contrasting definitions of ideology here, a “coherent body of ideas that legitimates political rule… [and] a form of thought or identity springing not from the ruling elite, but rather from a section of the populace” (Upstone, 2001). Sara Upstone argues that what unites them is their need for defining a context within which individuals locate themselves and their relationship to society. Religion denies pleasure to its disciples in exchange for a perceived stable sense of identity. However, Kureishi believed that such a process of “Islamisation”, of re-explaining and repossessing Islam for selfish purposes, did not build any hospitals, schools, houses, nor did it clean water and install electricity. But it entailed a sense of direction and identity: Moral mission[s] and the over-emphasis on dogma and punishment resulted in the kind of strengthening of the repressive, militaristic and nationalistically aggressive state seen all over the world in the authoritarian 1980s (2004: 26). Consequently, this strong sense of identity fundamentalists believed they had found and the strengthening of the repressive stance of the state collided and led to religious violence a few years later as much as it started the violent process whose results we witness today. The two worlds clash violently by the end of the novel, which also gestures towards the past burdening on the present. For Kureishi, tradition seems to create a sense of false intimacy: I compared the collective hierarchy of the family and the performance of my family’s circle with my feckless, rather rootless life in London, in what was called the “inner city”. There I lived alone, and lacked any long connection with anything…People came and went. There was much false intimacy and forced friendship. People didn’t take responsibility for each other. Many of my friends…didn’t merely want to reproduce the 64 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.55-71, ISSN 2339-8523 ANDREAS ATHANASIADES ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------old patterns of living. The future was to be determined by choice and reason, not by custom (1996: 38). Indeed, for him, the burden of the past disguised as tradition can be held responsible for people’s current view of society, which, in turn, can bring about a new wave of essentialist choices. In Kenan Malik’s From Fatwa to Jihad, Anandi Ramamurthy argues that the formation of the Asian Youth Movement in Bradford was an expression of the failure of “white” left organisations in Britain to effectively address the issues that affected Asian communities (2009: 52). We see a similar situation in Kureishi’s My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) where the character of the protagonist’s father, is an embodiment and a critique of the failed Left, which did not provide a viable alternative to Thatcherite policies. So, it seems that we can connect those two major events in the 1980s and today, namely the fatwa against Rushdie and the Jihad today with the alienation that young British Muslims felt, as the past -in the form of “the religion of our fatherland”- weighted on the present, affecting many of them. At the same time, we need to note that the failed Left could not offer a solution to right-wing identity policies which favoured heteronormative masculinity, racism and militancy, excluding thus from the national rubric people and communities such as homosexuals, Muslims, blacks etc. Naturally, such processes led to the alienation of these communities which in turn, led to violence. Kenan Malik reminds us of the Mullah Boys of Beeston, a gang led by two of the people who would later carry out the London bombings in 2005 (Mohammed Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer), arguing that those boys were consumed by rage, a loss of identity and getting caught between “no cultures”, having found the expression for their personal alienation in the spurious legitimacy of extremism (Gazi, 2009). It seems then that radical British Muslims got -albeit inadvertently- entangled in a Manichean position of “us and them” and “good and evil” -a situation that reflects the contemporary one- where pleasure was banned and the consequences of this were grave. And this was an issue that troubled Kureishi: It perplexed me that young people, brought up in secular Britain, would turn to a form of belief that denied them the pleasures of the society in which they lived…Why did they wish to maintain such a tantalizing relation to their own enjoyment, keeping it so fervently in mind, only to deny it? Or was this Puritanism a kind of rebellion, a brave refusal of the order of the age – an oversexualized but sterile society? (2005: 23). This relationship between past and present, read within the context of pleasure, seems to inform the ending of The Black Album. I argue that, just as Shahid, through choosing 65 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.55-71, ISSN 2339-8523 REPOSSESSING ISLAM ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------desire over religion, is able to dictate the path towards his own future, escaping essentialist choices, the same can be said about the choice British Muslims face today. Thus, it seems that sexual pleasure and played-out desires within the historical context created by the clash of past and present, can actually generate reality. After all, the entire socio-political field can be seen as a product of desire which is historically determined (Deleuze and Guattari, 1972: 18). It can be argued then that this realitygenerating sense of desire can grant freedom, pointing towards a path which MooreGilbert positions “between apoliticism and militancy” (2002: 115). As he is being translated from one culture to the other, Shahid wants recognition and acceptance from South Asians and British alike. In the end it all comes down to a sense of choice of where to belong. Shahid does not accept the traditional mentality as this would automatically impose restrictions and limitations to his life, as he would have to adhere to the essentialist binaries that come with it. This refusal has a twofold meaning, the first of which is the uneasiness of the members of the South Asian diasporic community in Britain with succumbing to limitations passed down from their colonial past. Secondly, it reveals Kureishi’s vision for a future society which comprises all polycultural aspects of its population, a vision not shared by today’s British fundamentalists. Desire then enables characters to avoid their entanglement into the ageold either-or position and shows that there is another way in their quest for a place in society, in that it enables them to escape the burden of tradition. It seems then that Kureishi rejects the old views in favour of a view of a future for Britain without imposed limitations and without allowing the past to weigh down the present, encouraging a cross-communal and transcultural understanding in the process. In the end, Shahid’s choice is a rejection of traditional thinking based on race or nationality, in exchange for his sexual life with Deedee. One could argue that Kureishi does not explore Shahid as such; rather, he re-inscribes him and the sexual manifestations of his identity, pointing to a new generation of immigrants who could escape tradition as a burden. He re-inscribes Shahid as someone who, not despite of, but because of his impossible position between cultures and identities, is able to dictate his own terms of belonging. Such a choice suggests alternative modes of belonging defined by cultural diversity rather than cultural (or racial) uniformity. I argue then that it is 66 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.55-71, ISSN 2339-8523 ANDREAS ATHANASIADES ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------possible for British Muslims to rethink their sense of belonging today in affective terms which would offer hope for the future as imagination is not consumed by fundamentalism anymore: The antidote to Puritanism isn’t licentiousness, but the recognition of what goes on inside human beings…Fundamentalism is dictatorship of the mind, but a lived culture is an exploration, and represents our endless curiosity about our own strangeness and impossible sexuality: wisdom is more important than doctrine; doubt more important than certainty. Fundamentalism implies the failure of our most significant attribute, our imagination (The Black Album 283). Brian Massumi is brought to mind here, as he reads affect as “a suspension of affectreaction circuits and linear temporality in a sink of what might be called passion” (2002: 29). This suspension constitutes a temporary solution to the impossible position of having to choose sides, as Shahid finds himself within a temporal and liminal space. What is more, Marco Abel has argued that affect is not defined as a thought, but rather as something associated with sentiment and feeling, and as something that lacks rationality (2007: 11). Thus, Shahid’s sexual, cultural and religious experimentation and the corresponding relevant aspects of identity, go on to testify to the need of the individual to choose a fluid identity and an ever-changing self as opposed to the strict limits Muslim fundamentalists define themselves in, which drives them to fight their host society and its values. Kureishi’s elucidation is to present identity as a process, as having an unstable and ever-changing nature, which allows his characters, and by association himself and the members of the diasporic community, not to choose sides, a process that Bart Moore-Gilbert has termed a “third way out” (2002: 115), as Shahid chooses passion over politics. This is a choice, indeed, which people like modern British fundamentalists fighting in the Middle East clearly did not make. On the contrary and in hindsight, Riaz can be read as the fictional representation of people like “Jihadi John” (even though it cannot be said that he represents or symbolises all fundamentalists) who force people to face harsh choices. In the wake of this clash between secularism, sexuality and religion, desire functions as a counterbalance to the political nature of religion, as it is understood by fundamentalism, thus not only being elevated, but also enabling the characters to escape the essentialist either/or position. And it is the implications of the violent scene at the end of the book, with the burning of the book at the university campus, that transcend the primary subject matter, as the true “practice and pedagogical force” (Abel, 2007: xiv) of literary images is unveiled. 67 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.55-71, ISSN 2339-8523 REPOSSESSING ISLAM ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Attending to the effects provoked by the reality of this violent image in literature, one has to think of these images in affective terms, as Abel argues, rather than “addressing them on the level of their representational quality, as is commonly done” (2007: xiv). Radical Islam and Imagination Kureishi has said that “Muslim fundamentalism has always seemed to me to be profoundly wrong, unnecessarily restrictive and frequently cruel. But there are reasons for its revival…it is...degrading to be a victim in your own country. If you feel excluded, it might be tempting to exclude others” (1994: xi-xii). This sums up perfectly the reasons behind what is happening today with ISIL and British fundamentalists. Because they feel excluded from the western type of life - just like their parents and their grandparents in the 1990s and 1980s-, they are susceptible to resort to violence in order to exclude others. However, this article has argued that if we start thinking about identity in affective terms and, given that such an examination can lead to a generating of reality, then the very real violent issues associated with the discontents of religion and questions of belonging in Britain today, can be addressed. It seems then that desire is transformed into a positive, productive force, especially in terms of subjectivity and belonging for members of the Muslim South Asian diasporic community in Britain and British society as a whole, as opposed to the limiting function of Islamic fundamentalism. Such a reading gestures towards a creation of a space of possibilities which, in turn, can lead to new ways of imagining identity and subjectivity. As long as this is not done, imagination and all its trajectories will continue to lose the battle against fundamentalism. As Faisal Gazi argues in an article in The Guardian, the Muhammad cartoons scandal and Random House’s decision to retract the publication of Sherry Jones’s novel The Jewel of Medina after an online thread on a discussion forum are just two instances of how the grievance of radical Islam is winning the battle against Enlightenment values (2009). Random House’s statement reads that “not only the publication of this book might be offensive to some in the Muslim community, but also it could incite acts of violence by a small, radical segment” (2008). It seems then that the threat of violence -albeit an indirect one- and fear have damaged imagination. This alienated “small, radical segment” is exactly the by-product of the processes started in 68 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.55-71, ISSN 2339-8523 ANDREAS ATHANASIADES ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------the 1980s and 1990s, as has been argued in the present article. Thus, reading identity in affective terms can be a solution to that problem, in that it offers a new way of thinking, pertaining to the social aspect of literature produced in the 1980s, a similar era of discontents as today, when the seeds of contemporary violence were planted. I argue that novels such as The Black Album are first and foremost “Zeitgeist” texts, a characteristic that goes beyond their aesthetic value. Indeed, they are literary works about the spirit of the times, engaging directly with very serious, contemporary problems such as Islamic fundamentalism. Had such literary production pertaining to affective issues been viewed not only in its aesthetic importance, but within a social context and had it been understood that such works could have had a profound effect on the grim reality we are facing today, we may have anticipated the alienation of certain groups that led to religious violence. Salman Rushdie in The Satanic Verses has said that “a poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it from going to sleep. And if rivers of blood flow from the cuts his verses inflict, then they will nourish him” (1988: 97). Similarly, Kureishi, defending such a scope of the text and talking about the role of the artist, asks: “But don’t writers try to explain genocide and that kind of thing? Novels are like a picture of life” (1995: 21). It seems then that literature, above and beyond its aesthetic value, has a very significant role to play in issues such as identity, estrangement and feelings of discontent especially among members of the Diaspora, as exemplified by its power to affect reality. WORKS CITED ABEL, MARCO (2007). Violent Affect: Literature, Cinema and Critique after Representation. Lincoln: University of Nebraska. AMITAVA, KUMAR (2001). “A Bang and a Whimper: A Conversation with Hanif Kureishi.” Transition 10:4: 114-131. BROWN, MICK (2011). “A Life Laid Bare.” Interview with Hanif Kureishi. Telegraph http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3671392/Hanif-Kureishi-A-life-laidbare.html DELEUZE, GILLES AND GUATTARI, FELIX (1972). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Penguin. 69 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.55-71, ISSN 2339-8523 REPOSSESSING ISLAM ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------DESAI, JIGNA (2004). Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film. New York: Routledge. EBERSTADT, FERNANDA (1995). “Rebel, Rebel.” The 3ew Yorker, 71: 25: 117-120. GAZI, FAISAL (2009). “Britain Since the Fatwa”. The Guardian, Online version, 14 April. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2009/apr/14/religion-islam GIDDA, MIRREN (2014). “No Place Like Home: What to Do When Jihadists Return”. 18 Nov 2014, BBC News. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-29725116 KUREISHI, HANIF (1996). “The Rainbow Sign”, in My Beautiful Laundrette and Other Writings. London: Faber and Faber, 1985. -------------------- (1990). The Buddha of Suburbia. London: Faber and Faber. -------------------- (1995). The Black Album. London: Faber and Faber. -------------------- (1997). My Son the Fanatic. London: Faber and Faber. -------------------- (2005). The Word and the Bomb. London: Faber and Faber. MACCABE, COLIN (2004). “Hanif Kureishi on London.” Critical Quarterly 41.3: 37-56. MAHMOOD, JAMAL (1988). “Dirty Linen.” in Black Film, British Cinema, ICA Documents, London: British Film Institute, 21-22. MALIK, KENAN (2009). From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and Its Legacy. London: Atlantic. ------------------ (2009). “Kureishi on the Rushdie Affair.” In Prospect, April 2009. MASSUMI, BRIAN (2002). Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University Press. MCLEOD, JOHN (2010). “Extra Dimensions, New Routines: Contemporary Black Writing of Britain.” Wasafiri 25.4: 45-52. MOORE-GILBERT, BART (2002). Hanif Kureishi. Manchester: Manchester University Press. RANASINHA, RUVANI (2001). Hanif Kureishi. Tavistock: Northcote House Publishers. RUSHDIE, SALMAN (1998). The Satanic Verses. London: Vintage Books, 1988. THE ECONOMIST (2014). “Turning them Around”. In Bridge over Troubled Water. Nov, 15. http://www.economist.com/news/britain/21632628-britain-becoming-more- sophisticated-dealing-returning-fighters-turning-them-around 70 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.55-71, ISSN 2339-8523 ANDREAS ATHANASIADES ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------THE RANDOM HOUSE PUBLISHING GROUP (2008). Statement on the Jewel of Medina. http://www.randomhouse.com/rhpg/medinaletter.html UPSTONE, SARA (2001). “A Question of Black or White: Returning to Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album.” Postcolonial Text 4.1, 2008. http://www.postcolonial.org/index.php/pct/article/download/679/518 71 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.55-71, ISSN 2339-8523 Indi@logs Vol 2 2015, pp. 72-92, ISSN: 2339-8523 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------BHARATI MUKHERJEE’S STRUGGLE AGAIST CULTURAL BALKAIZATIO: THE FORGIG OF A EW AMERICA IMMIGRAT WRITIG Mª LUZ GONZÁLEZ & JUAN IGNACIO OLIVA Universidad de La Laguna [email protected]; [email protected] Received: 28-11-2014 Accepted: 21-01-2015 ABSTRACT This paper aims at analysing Bharati Mukherjee’s individual positioning as a woman writer by using the female characters caught between two different worlds, homes and cultures present in her works. After having undergone several phases in her life: as an exile from India, an Indian expatriate in Canada, a common immigrant and finally a citizen in the United States, all these diverse selves have been translated into her literary career. The writer thus envisions herself as a pioneer of new lands and literatures, initiating a process of re-forming and de-forming American culture, and redefining diaspora as a process of unhyphenated rehousement in which the cultural landscape in which one lives is no longer divided into a centre and its peripheries. Mukherjee celebrates “racial and cultural mongrelisation” but rejects cultural balkanization in its defence of the local over the national. She is neither ignorant nor insensitive to racism and oppression in the United States, yet her characters are always tenacious and feisty in their struggle to belong. Mukherjee stresses their quality as battlers, moved by the instinct to improve their lives. In her construction of America as the land of opportunity and success Mukherjee rejects homesickness and in so doing she clearly marks a difference from the Indian diaspora, though we consider that in defending this posture she goes to extremes, idealizing the “real” to create a personal and literary migrant cosmos. KEYWORDS: Bharati Mukherjee, Indian diaspora, Identity, Dehyphenation & Rehousement RESUME La lucha de Bharati Mukherjee contra la balcanización cultural: la creación de una nueva escritura inmigrante americana Este artículo tiene por objeto el estudio de la posición individual de Bharati Mukherjee como escritora, a través de los personajes femeninos que aparecen en sus obras, a caballo entre dos mundos, casas y culturas variopintos. Tras pasar por fases vitales diferenciadas: como exiliada de la India, expatriada en Canadá, emigrante común y lograr, finalmente, la nacionalidad estadounidense, todas estas identidades se trasladan a su carrera literaria. Así, la autora se concibe a sí misma como una pionera en tierras y literaturas nuevas, iniciando un proceso de reformulación y deconstrucción de la cultura americana, y redefiniendo la diáspora como un proceso de rehabitación sin líneas divisorias en el cual el paisaje cultural vivido no presenta centro ni periferias. Mukherjee festeja una “bastardización racial y cultural” y rechaza la balcanización cultural en su defensa de lo local sobre lo nacional. No es, por otra parte, ajena ni insensible al racismo y la opresión de los Estados Unidos, pero sus personajes se muestran pertinaces en luchar por su sentido de “pertenencia.” Mukherjee pone el énfasis en su cualidad de batalladores, empeñados en mejorar sus vidas. En su construcción Mª LUZ GONZÁLEZ & JUAN IGNACIO OLIVA ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------de América como tierra de oportunidades y logros, Mukherjee evita la morriña y, al hacerlo, se aparta con claridad de la diáspora india, aunque tendemos a pensar que al defender tal postura llega al extremo e idealiza lo “real” para así crear un cosmos migratorio literario y distintivo. PALABRAS CLAVE: Bharati Mukherjee, diáspora india, identidad, rehabitación sin líneas divisorias “In this age of diasporas, one’s biological identity may not be one’s only identity. Erosions and accretions come with the act of emigration.” (Bharati Mukherjee, “American Dreamer”) The Indian born American writer Bharati Mukherjee (b. 1940) migrated to Canada in 1968, after studying at the University of Iowa, in the United States. She became a Canadian citizen four years later, in 1972. Mukherjee has described her fourteen years in this country, in Montreal and Toronto,1 as the hardest of her life, as she felt continuously discriminated against and treated as a member of the “visible minorities” (Darkness 2). Finally, and tired of this unhappy situation, the writer and her family, her husband, the American writer of Canadian descent, Clark Blaise, and her two sons, moved to the United States in 1980, where they currently live. Bharati Mukherjee has been described as a writer who has gone through several phases in her life: as an exile from India, as an Indian expatriate2 in Canada, as a common immigrant and then as a citizen in the United States. All these lives, selves and 1 In the introduction to her collection of stories Darkness (1985) Mukherjee writes: “In the years I spent in Canada ―1966 to 1980― I discovered that the country is hostile to its citizens who had been born in hot, moist continents like Asia; that the country proudly boasts of its opposition to the whole concept of cultural assimilation. In the Indian immigrant community I saw a family of shared grievances. The purely “Canadian” stories in this collection were difficult to write and even more painful to live through. They are uneasy stories about expatriation” (2). Logically, these kinds of statements were harshly received by the Canadians, but even before in her essay “An Invisible Woman” (1981), which won the National Magazine Award’s second prize, Mukherjee had sharply criticized Canada’s treatment of Indians. The writer states that during her stay in Canada she acquired a “double vision”. Her experience of being an Indian woman in white Canada made life, on occasions, paradoxical for her. She explains: “the oldest paradox of prejudice is that it renders its victims simultaneously invisible and overexposed” (38). And it was precisely the difficulty to “keep her twin halves together” (40) that made her take the decision to leave Canada. In Vignisson’s interview with Mukherjee, the writer states that though this essay was received in a very hostile way at the beginning, then “it apparently affected official policy in Canada” (para. 30). 2 To Bharati Mukherjee there exist essential differences between being an expatriate and being an immigrant: “An expatriate is someone who is nourished by the old world, whose psychic life is still totally attached to the discarded world thousands of miles away. An immigrant is someone who in psychological, social, psychic ways, has made herself or himself over in the new world. Who’s accepting the new world as her own” (Moyers para. 28). Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.72-92, ISSN 2339-8523 73 BHARATI MUKHERJEE’S STRUGGLE ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------backgrounds have been fused and have materialized, with a rich and playful language, in a prolific career: eight novels, four short story collections, a memoir, co-authored with her husband, and several non-fiction books. Her aim has been to create a “new immigrant” literature. Mukherjee’s ease with discovering her identity as a mainstream American, becoming an award-winning writer, her constant participation in the dialogues and incidents of American society, her refusal to be marginalized, and her absolute mastery of English are not surprising when one learns that she was born in an upper-middle-class Brahmin family in Calcutta. Her education in India was at a convent school run by Irish nuns. She was also educated in England and Switzerland. She came to the United States in 1961 to attend the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa, where she received an M.F.A. in Creative Writing and a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature. She currently teaches in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley. Mukherjee envisions herself as a pioneer of new lands and literatures: “My stories centre on a new breed and generation of North American pioneers. I am fascinated by people who have enough gumption, energy, ambition, to pull up their roots….My stories are about conquests and not about loss” (Hancock 37). The aim of this paper is to analyse Mukherjee’s female characters caught between two different worlds, homes and cultures, the social oppression they suffer and the enduring courage to survive, and how they finally attempt to or become assimilated in the host culture. In addition, this essay will also deal with the writer’s attitudes towards Canada and the US. In her imagination, the author experiences the pioneer’s ability to perceive the new culture with complete new eyes, and in doing so, initiates a process of re-forming and deforming that culture.3 Her aim as a writer is to prove, not only how America has transformed her, but also how migrants, like her, have also recreated America (Mukherjee, “A Four-Hundred-Year-Old Woman” 35). This is precisely her re-definition of diaspora as a process of unhyphenated re-housement that keeps her conception of America open to continuous expansion and literary invention. Furthermore, Mukherjee claims that “rejecting hyphenation is my refusal to categorize the cultural landscape into a centre and its 3 See Tine Chen and S. X. Goudie . “Holders of the Word: An Interview with Bharati Mukherjee,” (1996) in http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/jovert/v l i l/Bharat.htm. 07/01/2009. 74 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.72-92, ISSN 2339-8523 Mª LUZ GONZÁLEZ & JUAN IGNACIO OLIVA ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------peripheries; it is to demand that the American nation deliver the promises of its dream and its Constitution to all citizens equally” (“American Dreamer” para. 3). On the contrary, she identifies the UK, and also Canada, with imperialism and colonization.4 This identification was formed when studying in England as a child, so she had quite a clear idea that the United States was the place where she would do her university studies: I am the first generation of Indians who even thought of going to the United States rather than automatically to England. For me it was especially exciting to go to America because England to me connoted colonialism. It was associated with all that I had left behind. Because I had gone to school in England as a child I was aware of what it felt like to be a minority, and I knew I didn’t want that. (Vignisson para.18) There exists, then, an inversely proportional relationship between her construction of the American Dream, a New World of freedom and democracy, and her detachment from personal experiences in countries like the two previously mentioned. In fact, all her work is a literary celebration of her own emotions in which she projects her own dilemmas and plights. “Like myself,” Mukherjee points out, “my characters are always in between. They are trying to balance the two [worlds] and sometimes the scales tilt one way, sometimes another” (Moyers para. 7).5 America, then, presents itself as a generous nation with an equal opportunity policy for all, including the emigrants. However, it is important to mention that Mukherjee makes a distinction between The United States and “America” (written between inverted commas). The former makes reference to the nation with its official Constitution, “economic and foreign policies, its demarcated, patrolled boundaries”, while “America,” she explains, “exists as image or idea, as dream or nightmares, as 4 Mukherjee affirms: “Western Europe, Canada and England treat their non-European immigrants, even if they have been there for two and three generations, as though they are guest workers. They never really accept them as real citizens….Whereas America, because of its mythology, allows me to think of myself how long have I been here, you know, since 1961 minus fourteen years in Canada –that if I want to think of myself as American I am an American and I have an American citizenship. Whereas in England I would not dare assume that I can be an Englishman unless I was born with a certain kind of name, certain kind of look, certain kind of accent” (Vignisson para. 35). 5 On another occasion, Mukherjee also confesses how much she is involved, not only with her characters, their passions and personalities, but also with the stories told in her novels: “I realize now that each of the novels is sort of a way station in my personal Americanization…I think that most writers, like actors, have to dig inside themselves for the passions of their characters….I feel that I am invested, metaphorically, in every single character in each of the books” (Desai and Barnstone 132). Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.72-92, ISSN 2339-8523 75 BHARATI MUKHERJEE’S STRUGGLE ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------romance or plague, constructed by discrete individual fantasies, and shaded by collective paranoias and mythologies” (Mukherjee, “Beyond Multiculturalism” 29). Her work explores the lives of immigrants in North America, with special attention to the condition of Asian women in the “New World”. She constructs her literary universe around the concept of “transplantation and psychological metamorphosis” (Mukherjee, “Imagining Homelands” 70), and this was a result of her move to North America (Canada and mostly the United States). In fact, “the idea of transformation, of life being a process of almost constant and radical evolution” (Connell et al. 8) has become the most important theme in her work. Mukherjee has admitted that she “writes about what obsesses [her] –the re-housement of individuals and of whole peoples” (Hancock 38). Her characters belong to different ethnic backgrounds and nationalities: Afghanistan, Uganda, Bangladesh, Calcutta, Bombay, Nepal, Trinidad, etcetera, but all of them share the experience of diaspora and the same stage “for the drama of self-transformation.”6 For Mukherjee, the immigrant writer’s aim is “to transform as well as be transformed by the world I’m re-imagining and recreating through words” (Chen and Goudie para. 70). In other words, she is especially concerned with foregrounding the positive side of immigration. Thus, while her characters are conscious of the injustices and brutality that surround them and are presented as victims of different kinds of social oppression, the writer also draws them as survivors. Sharmani P. Gabriel explains such a dichotomy as follows: I would insist that the distinctiveness of [Mukherjee’s] work in the tradition of diaspora literature in general and American literature in particular lies in Mukherjee’s ability to mine the tension that holds in balance her awareness of diaspora as a condition of loss or unhousement, involving a break in that link between cultures, peoples or identities and places, on the one hand, and her acknowledgement of it as a condition of gain or rehousement, of recreation, re-imagination and regeneration in new social, political, cultural and geographical landscapes, on the other. (para. 4) Mukherjee makes allusion to the phrase “cultural balkanization” in her essay “American Dreamer” (1997). The term “balkanization” was firstly coined in the aftermath of the First World War to mean the division of a state into smaller often hostile units, but as 6 For Bharati Mukherjee, America “is the stage for the drama of self-transformation” (Mukherjee, “Beyond Multiculturalism: Surviving the Nineties” 29). 76 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.72-92, ISSN 2339-8523 Mª LUZ GONZÁLEZ & JUAN IGNACIO OLIVA ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------expressed in the British Encyclopaedia,7 it has also contemporary resonance in the light of ethnic conflict with multiethnic states. In the interesting essay “Cultural Balkanization and Hybridization in an Era of Globalization,” Brian W. Husted adds that cultural balkanization “is a term used in the US to describe the tendency to assert local identities over national identity….a return to the ‘particular’ after a deal of interest in the ‘universal’” (6). The phenomenon of globalization is opposite to balkanization. However, both, according to Husted, transcend national boundaries and undermine national identity. For Mukherjee, the connotations of cultural balkanization are negative; she celebrates “racial and cultural mongrelisation” (“American Dreamer” para. 5), but, as has already been mentioned and will be explained later on, she rejects the hyphen: “I am American,” she states, “not an Asian-American. My rejection of hyphenation has been called race treachery, but it is really a demand that America deliver the promises of its dream to all its citizens equally” (“American Dreamer” para. 1). The writer’s early stories, especially those written during her stay in Canada, are much more pessimistic than those set in the US. As several critics have pointed out (Gabriel, Brewster, Esterbauer, among others), Mukherjee’s work can be divided into expatriate and immigrant phases. In the expatriate phase, in which her two novels, The Tiger’s Daughter (1972) and Wife (1975) and the four Canadian stories published in her first collection Darkness (1985) may be placed, moods of unhousement, pessimistic rootlessness and despair are very frequent among her characters. The second or immigrant phase coincides with her emigration to the US (1981) up to the present. And curiously enough, this trajectory from Canada to the United States coincides with the canonisation of her fiction. She stopped being a relatively anonymous writer without recognition in Canada to have award-winning success in the US, and it was with the publication of The Middleman and Other Stories (1988) that Mukherjee seems to have found her true literary identity and American self. In this respect, this paper will only deal with the writer’s immigrant and rather more positive phase.8 7 See full citation in the final bibliography. For further information about Mukherjee’s different phases along her career, see Sharmani P. Gabriel’s article. 8 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.72-92, ISSN 2339-8523 77 BHARATI MUKHERJEE’S STRUGGLE ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Bharati Mukherjee’s characters migrate across land in search of a new self and definition. They are moved by an intensity of spirit and a strong desire to get on in life. In fact, Mukherjee herself defines her characters as those who “have shed old identities, taken on new ones, and learned to hide the scars” (“A Four-Hundred-Year-Old Woman” 35). The protagonist of Mukherjee’s novel Jasmine (1991) sees herself involved in an odyssey in her journey from India to America; a journey which is not only cross-cultural but also spiritual. In her innermost desire to escape from the oppressive environment of Hasnapur, the Indian village where she lives, Jasmine, throughout the novel, is going to suffer several transformations, different metamorphoses, each preceded with a new name which also provides insight into her very complex life. Jasmine’s renaming takes place five times throughout the novel, all of which start with “J.” The letter “J,” according to the archetypal symbolism of the Tarot, represents ambition, will, force, action, vision. “J” is equivalent to number one in numerology, and to Aleph as a Cabbala symbol.9 Every one of the names represents the arrival at a new place but, primarily, each of them is a symbol of rebirth. All these transmutations turn Jasmine into the perfect embodiment of flow, movement and growth.10 Jasmine’s first name is Jyoti, a name used while she was living in India, which means “light, brilliance and radiance,” then Jazzy, once she arrives in the US, a name that Mrs. Gordon, the American woman who takes care of her after she is raped by Half-Face, gives her. Jazzy learns how to behave and walk as an American. As Rie Koike sustains, “she needs the flashy name in order to abandon her Hasnapur modesty and transform herself into a dynamic American” (para. 12). Through this same woman Jasmine meets Taylor, her final lover, who gives her the names Jase and Jassy. But before that, she lives on a farm in Iowa for a while with Bud, who names her Jane. Jane, however, is not the common name it seems to be; at least Jasmine is not “Plain Jane.” In fact, during this period of her life, she 9 See Irene Gad’s Tarot and Individuation. Correspondences with Cabala and Alchemy. York Beach, Maine: Nicholas-Hays, 1994. 10 Bharati Mukherjee has also used the same notion of rebirth when talking about her own transformation as an immigrant from the East into a country belonging to the West, a rebirth that first of all is preceded by a process of annihilation of her previous selves: “I have been murdered and reborn at least three times; the correct young woman I was trained to be, and was very happy being, is very different from the politicised, shrill, civil rights activist I was in Canada, and from the urgent writer that I have become in the last few years in the United States. I can’t stop. It’s a compulsive act for me” (M. Connell, J. Grearson, and T. Grimes 19). 78 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.72-92, ISSN 2339-8523 Mª LUZ GONZÁLEZ & JUAN IGNACIO OLIVA ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------plays the role of a destroyer, a “tornado,” as Bud’s ex-wife calls her, because of the way in which she takes everything in her stride. Jasmine, however, is the most important of all her names, the one which gives its title to the novel, and the most significant one from an archetypal perspective. Like the flower associated to her name, Jasmine’s climbing nature talks about her never-ending ambition to improve in life, and each step forward is marked by a moment of catastrophic resistance and extreme energy,11 such as when Jyoti leaves India when her husband is assassinated or when Jasmine kills Half-Face after he rapes her. As Koike points out “her energy is used to uproot herself from place to place, and even to choose which routes she will take in ‘the tug of opposing forces’” (para. 17). Chen and Goudin assert that Mukherjee works like a bricoleur, “parts are used and reused, shaped and reshaped, much like the character Jasmine’s identity” (para. 9). Jasmine is the embodiment of all potentialities of existence. As was previously stated, she goes through several transformations, and one has the impression when finishing the novel that she is still open to many more transmutations, something the protagonist seems to have learned in America: In America, nothing lasts. I can say that now and it doesn’t shock me, but I think it was the hardest lesson of all for me to learn. We [immigrants] arrive so eager to learn, to adjust, to participate, only to find the monuments are plastic, agreements are annulled. Nothing is forever, nothing is so terrible, or so wonderful, that it won’t disintegrate. (Jasmine 181) America is then the land of possible and multiple transmutations; the New World where anyone can fulfil his/her dreams, including emigrants, through individual struggle. As Anne Brewster argues, the writer’s discourse on migration in the US places her characters, not on the margin of contemporary American culture, but rather as belonging to the mainstream of a new vision of America.12 In this new vision of America, Mukherjee perceives its culture as “a culture of dreamers, who believe that material shape (which is not the same as 11 For further information on this idea and its relationship with Chaos Theory see Rie Koike’s article. As Brewster also states, Bharati Mukherjee’s characteristic migrant discourse and her insistence in creating an optimistic vision of America is directly related to her literary success. Moreover, it contributes to her affiliation with or defense of a particular conception of the US: “Her own literary success places her firmly within the American literary canon and this success reflects the receptivity of certain constituencies to a reinvention and revitalisation of American nationalism” (para. 1). 12 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.72-92, ISSN 2339-8523 79 BHARATI MUKHERJEE’S STRUGGLE ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------materialism) can be given to dreams….They believe in the reversal of omens; early failures do not spell inevitable disaster. Outsiders can triumph on merit” (“Beyond Multiculturalism” 29). With this idea in mind, Mukherjee creates Jasmine’s title character. Jasmine crosses the ocean and transforms her world. In analysing her personality, this character undoubtedly reminds us of Pablo Picasso’s famous quote: “Every act of creation is first an act of destruction,”13 and Jasmine destroys her past in order to create a future. The process, however, is never devoid of pain: “...if you’re going to not remain an expatriate,” Mukherjee points out, “then there has to be a traumatic, painful kind of break with the past. After that you might reclaim little bits and pieces of it and fit them into your change; otherwise, you’re burrowing in nostalgia” (Desai and Barnstone 141). In other words, the integration of the immigrant into a new culture goes together with the constant fight against cultural memory; an idea that the author herself also seems to support as implied by her words: “We need to discourage the retention of cultural memory if the aim of that retention is cultural balkanization….In this age of diasporas, one’s biological identity may not be one’s only identity. Erosions and accretions come with the act of emigration” (“American Dreamer” para. 20).14 Jennifer Drake clarifies an important point about Mukherjee’s concept of assimilation. For her, assimilation means “cultural looting” however, this is not simply a question of celebration. “Mukherjee,” Drake points out, “fabulizes America, Hinduizes assimilation, and represents the real pleasures and violence of cultural exchange” (61). As was previously explained, the writer rejects the emigrant’s nostalgia. Bharati Mukherjee is a writer who clearly swims against the tide in the Indian diaspora. Jasmine celebrates the journey, the departure from the home culture, rather than insisting, as is normally the case, on an intense nostalgia and a deep sense of isolation. However, Parameswaran considers that Mukherjee goes to extremes in her different attitude: “Literary texts have tended to focus more on the underside of this gargantuan experience of 13 http://www.pablopicasso.org/quotes.jsp A possible explanation to the existent dichotomy in India between the emigrants’ wish to move to other places, and his/her simultaneous longing to retain his/her culture when abroad may be found in Uma Parameswaran’s following affirmation: “Emigration is not a new phenomenon in India. Land of paradox that India is, the Indian ethos has a tendency to stay ‘rooted in one dear perpetual place,’ as Yeats would say, and at the same time to promote an attitude of detachment that facilitates travel” (“Ganga in the Assiniboine” 72). 14 80 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.72-92, ISSN 2339-8523 Mª LUZ GONZÁLEZ & JUAN IGNACIO OLIVA ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------expatriation, alienation and transplantation. Perhaps the only literary work that has taken a celebratory angle, Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine goes overboard in the opposite direction, validating the American dream while panning all things Indian” (“Home is Where Your Feet are,” 212). Mukherjee appropriates the idea that identity in the East, at least in Hindu traditional families, is a notion completely different from identity in the West: The concept [of identity crisis] itself – of a person not knowing who she or he was –was unimaginable in a hierarchical, classification-obsessed society. One’s identity was absolutely fixed, derived from religion, caste, patrimony, and mother tongue. A Hindu Indian’s last name was designed to announce his or her forefather’s caste and place of origin. A Mukherjee could only be a Brahmin from Bengal (Mukherjee, “Beyond Multiculturalism: Surviving the Nineties” 30). The aforementioned has gradually become the general norm with many diaspora writers, and Mukherjee has particularly rejected the phenomenon of hyphenation as a multiethnic label.15 She does not want to be regarded by critics as a South Asian American writer,16 but just as an American. Neither does she want to be studied within the field of postcolonial studies. She vehemently declares: The mission of postcolonial studies as a discipline is to level all of us to our skin color and ethnic origin whereas as a writer, my job is to open up, to discover and say “we are all 15 The writer affirms: “For me, hyphenization is a very discomforting situation for two reasons. It makes you want a way out, a net. You say, All right, so this doesn’t work: I am an Indian for the whites and I am an American for the Indians −a kind of fence straddling that is almost immoral. I am trying to get white Americans and African Americans to see how deliberately and cruelly and maliciously marginalizing it is to apply the hyphen only to Asian Americans, Chicanos, and so on….It’s as though they’re saying there is one kind of America, and the rest of you because you’re hyphenated − whether you wanted to be or not…are not really like US.” So that’s why, in order to emphasize the two-way transformation, I’m saying either call everyone American or make everyone hyphenated” (Desai and Barnstone 143). 16 And on another occasion she states: “If you insist…that I describe myself in terms of ethno-nationality, I’d say I’m an American writer of Bengali-Indian origin. In other words, the writer/political activist in me is more obsessed with addressing the issues of minority discourse in the U.S. and Canada, the two countries I have lived and worked over the last thirty odd years” (Chen and Goudie para. 6). Uma Parameswaran, on the other hand, sustains that in a pluralistic society, like that of the United States or Canada, diasporic writers “must go beyond the hyphen without erasing it….Hyphens have long been subject of controversy in our search for identity. Do hyphens marginalize us? Many think so….My own resolution to the problem has been that we have to wear the hyphen with pride in Canada, and that outside Canada we must see and present ourselves as Canadians, without a hyphen” (“Diaspora Consciousness. Going Beyond the Hyphen without Erasing It” 204). Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.72-92, ISSN 2339-8523 81 BHARATI MUKHERJEE’S STRUGGLE ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------individuals”. In fiction we are writing about individuals; none of them is meant to be a crude spokesperson for whole groups, whether those groups are based on gender or race or class. If the story of one individual reveals something about the way in which human nature works, great, if it doesn’t, then it has failed as art….The mission of postcolonial studies seems to be to deliberately equate Art and journalism, to reduce novels to specimens for the confirming of their theories. If an imaginative work doesn’t fit the cultural theories they approve of, it’s dismissed as defective. (Chen and Goudie para. 58) “Indianness is now a metaphor,” she affirms elsewhere, “a particular way of partially comprehending the world” (Introd. Darkness 3). In her construction of a new immigrant writing in America, Mukherjee confers India with the status of the “old” world, “that kind of Third World hierarchy where your opportunities are closed by caste, gender, or family” (as quoted by Anne Brewster para. 3). On the contrary, in the writer’s imagination, that is, in her reinvention of an immigrant narrative, America represents fluidity and freedom. But as Drake observes, this freedom also has its price: “American freedom costs her the clarity and stability of full-Brahmin status, sacrificed when she marries a white French-Canadian American. In this respect, she exchanges racial invisibility in India for ‘minority’ status in North America” (65). To become an immigrant writer, and no longer an expatriate, Mukherjee knew that she had to shed her old clothes, so to speak, only then she, in her personal mythology, could be reborn as a true American: “I was [bicultural] when I wrote The Tiger’s Daughter, now I am no longer so and America is more real to me than India…I realised I was no longer an expatriate but an immigrant –that my life was more here…I need to belong. America matters to me. It is not that India failed me – rather America transformed me” (Introd. Darkness 3). However simplistic this posture may seem, Mukherjee shows in her works that she is neither ignorant nor insensitive to racism and oppression in the United States.17 Her protagonists are always tenacious and feisty, divided between two very different worlds, the home and host countries, a “fractured” process of belonging, as the author herself states, 17 The writer argues: “I am aware of the dark side of America as well as the romanticism that America offers people like me, and I think that both the dark side and the hope comes through….And because this country is centred around a constitution that promises democracy, promises equal rights, when things don’t work out right I want to be able to work to make it right” (Vignisson para. 48). This statement confirms Mukerjee’s construction of a personal mythology in her work. 82 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.72-92, ISSN 2339-8523 Mª LUZ GONZÁLEZ & JUAN IGNACIO OLIVA ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------that results in a “whole odyssey of moving, pulling up your roots from your original country and re-rooting yourself in an adopted country…” (Moyers para. 33). In Darkness, her first short story collection (1985), the protagonists are often women who are married or divorced. For instance, in “Hindus,” a story with clear reminiscences of Mukherjee’s own life, Leela Lahiri, the main character, reveals a fluid identity. On the one hand, she proudly declares “I am an American citizen,” but she also feels very proud of her Bengali Brahmin part. She has tried to leave her past behind by marrying a white man. However, when she is referred to as Maharajah Patwat Singh’s “niece,” Leela feels offended, since she is too conscious of her caste-superiority in India. She is neither a typical Indian nor a true American. Another interesting story in the collection is “Visitors.” Vinita, a beautiful Indian girl who accepts an arranged marriage in India, travels to America just a few days after the wedding. Encouraged by the promises of “the New World” and the inner necessity to change, and now that she is in a new country and far from her relatives, she rebels against a golden rule in Indian society: an Indian wife would never allow any stranger in her house when her husband is away. Against this cultural dictum she allows an Indian born American graduate student to come in and take liberty with her. Although she is very traditionally “Indian” in some aspects - and she is described as “discreet, dutiful, comfortable with her upper-class status, trained by her mother to stay flexible” (163-164) her duality is clear from the way she enjoys the freedom of America. Vinita is eager for change, “the slightest possibility of disruption,” as we read in another moment of the story, “pleases her” (164). In the collection The Middleman and Other Stories (1988), every story ends on a new beginning, a new point of departure. The protagonists, men and women immigrants from different countries, have become sort of “chronic travellers” when moving to the “New World.” This collection tells the experience of eleven people from different backgrounds who are forced to leave behind their individual cultures as they struggle to absorb the American milieu. “Being on the run,” as Jonathan Raban asserts, seems to be “an American condition. The Americans in The Middleman are constantly being awakened to their own restlessness and fluidity by the newcomers” (Raban para.12). Moreover, all the characters are, in one way or another, acting “as barrier and gateway between competing cultural Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.72-92, ISSN 2339-8523 83 BHARATI MUKHERJEE’S STRUGGLE ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------value systems” (Raphael Koster para. 1). They are hybrids who show that these barriers can indeed be crossed, and that they only exist because the members of each culture want to mark the difference between cultures. In three stories, each with a female protagonist, “A Wife’s Story,” “The Tenant,” and “Jasmine” we find a different woman at a different stage in the complex and often traumatic process of becoming a new person, one who wants to feel at home in the sometimes “terrifying freedom” of the new American culture (SantWade and Radell 12). In each story, the exhilarating world of possibilities clashes with the debilitating world of loss, yet the ever present determination of these three women denies the power of pity and disillusion. In “A Wife’s Story,” for instance, the protagonist, Mrs. Panna Bhatt, goes to America to take a Ph.D. degree without her husband, who remains in India. To survive she adapts to the social demands of America, breaking taboos and abandoning the confines of a traditional Indian wife’s life. An Indian wife can never think of making a man her friend, because just to have a feeling of affection for someone is a sign of disloyalty. However, Panna is heavily weighed down by the burdens of the two cultures and she tries to balance parts of her old life with the best of the new. The same thing happens to the protagonist of “The Tenant,” Maya Sanyal. Maya is a brave adventuress; she has been marked as a “loose” woman and as a divorcee, and therefore knows she cannot ever hope to remarry respectably in the Indian community. Neither is she interested. She drinks alcohol and is very promiscuous, she “has slept with married men, with nameless men, with men little more than boys, but never with an Indian man. Never” (103). There is a moment in the story in which Maya tells how in the mid seventies, when many women in America were fighting for their liberation, she had problems with some women for being too “feminine.” Although she tries her best to “belong,” to “adapt” herself to the new culture, going to extremes on some occasions, there always remains a “but,” the indelible burden of tradition and education: Her grandmother had been married off at the age of five in a village now in Bangladesh. Her great-aunt had been burned to death over a dowry problem. She herself had been trained to speak softly, arrange flowers, sing, be pliant….She has broken with the past. But. (Mukherjee, The Middleman and Other Stories 102) Thus, although she attempts to break with her Indian past, Maya understands that there exists no such thing as a complete break with her roots. Finally, “Jasmine” is the story of a Trinidadian woman who has been smuggled illegally into the United States. As Koster 84 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.72-92, ISSN 2339-8523 Mª LUZ GONZÁLEZ & JUAN IGNACIO OLIVA ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------argues, her story is that of the person who “attempts to cross the cultural barrier but fails to grasp the true nature of the discourse….She lacks sufficient knowledge of the culture to understand what is happening to her in any objective sense” (para. 9). And so when Bill Moffitt seduces her, clearly with the only intention of having sex with her, she interprets his proximity and flattery as true love. In the short story “The Management of Grief,” the closing story of Mukherjee’s collection The Middleman and Other Stories, the writer uses a tone quite different from the majority of stories in the collection. It is sombre and melancholy. The story is based on a real event. On June 23, 1985, an Air India plane left Toronto for London Heathrow, the first stop on its journey to Bombay. As the airplane prepared to descend into London, it was blown up, sending the craft into the Irish Sea. All 329 passengers, ninety percent of whom were Canadians of Indian ancestry, lost their lives in this bomb attack. “Management of Grief” starts in the aftermath of that horrible incident. Apart from Mukherjee’s brave criticism of the Canadian government’s attitude at the time – which considered the crash as an “Indian” event carried out by Sikh extremists, when in fact, as was previously stated, ninety per cent of the passengers were Canadian – the story is very interesting from an archetypal perspective. It predominantly focuses on the widows’ reconciliation to absence and mourning. Mukherjee, to support her defence of America’s melting-pot against Canada’s mosaic, cunningly creates two opposite characters: Kusum, who succumbs to her culture’s expectations, dedicating the rest of her life to her dead husband, and Shaila, the main protagonist, who struggles with oppressive cultural demands, finally rejecting them. In India, three months after the crash, Shaila tries to adapt again to her home culture. She returns to the role of the only child in a wealthy family. Shaila feels, at this moment, completely divided between her Indian roots and her newer Canadian life, “I am trapped,” she says, “between two modes of knowledge. At thirty six, I am too old to start over and too young to give up. Like my husband’s spirit, I flutter between worlds” (189). Shaila’s main roles before the crash are that of mother and wife. As is proper of an upper-class Indian woman, she has never called her husband by his first name or told him that she loved him. When her husband dies Shaila calls into question her blind obedience to Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.72-92, ISSN 2339-8523 85 BHARATI MUKHERJEE’S STRUGGLE ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Hindu female decorum, and there is a moment in which, instead of throwing some roses in water to honour death, as is traditionally prescribed in Hindu culture, she prefers to “let fall into the calm, glassy waters” (187) a poem she wrote for her husband, finally expressing her feelings for him. At one point in the story, Kusum and Shaila go into the water, hoping for a miracle, to search for survivors who might be trapped under a rock. According to J. E. Cirlot, in India, water is generally regarded as “the preserver of life…limitless and immortal, the waters are the beginning and the end of all things on earth” (364). However, though Shaila in a moment of total desperation confesses she “could settle in the water” (185), they return back to earth knowing that this “immersion” has really meant a sense of death and annihilation, on the one hand, provoked by discouragement and despair but, on the other, of regeneration as they, each of them, will individually have to start a new life: “when we leave the water,” Cirlot asserts, “the new man suddenly appears” (365). The tragedy of the crash makes the confrontation between the two cultures especially palpable, “an unseen but ubiquitous veil of female oppression, challenging the affected women to break free.”18 An Indian wife and mother, Shaila is expected to follow mourning traditions. The Hindu widow cannot remarry, is prohibited from wearing certain hair decorations and jewellery, and is restricted in her choice of dress. In short, she is meant to spend the rest of her life despairing over the loss of her husband, denying her social and sexual needs, and even doing penance as if somehow responsible for her husband’s death. Shaila’s grandmother has always been an example of such self-sacrifice: she shaves her head, thereby obliterating any trace of vanity or sexual appeal, and lives in self-imposed seclusion. She is so devoted to mourning that she forsakes her infant daughter, passing her upbringing to an “indifferent uncle”(3).19 Fortunately, Shaila’s mother has learned to be progressive and taught Shaila to behave in a rational and liberal way. Three months after the mourning rituals, Shaila feels the necessity to return to Canada to “finish” what she and her husband started. In so doing, she rebels against irrevocable ideas about both gender and culture. She is no longer an “Indian” woman, but an Indian Canadian. Kusum, on the other hand, returns to India, becoming even 18 In “The Management of Grief (Themes).” *otes on Short Stories. Answers Corporation, 2006. Answers.com. Web. 20 April 2009. < http://www.answers.com/topic/the-management-of-grief-story-3> . 19 “The Management of Grief (Themes).” *otes on Short Stories. Answers Corporation, 2006. Answers.com. Web. 20 April 2009. < http://www.answers.com/topic/the-management-of-grief-story-3> . 86 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.72-92, ISSN 2339-8523 Mª LUZ GONZÁLEZ & JUAN IGNACIO OLIVA ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------more Indian than before. Like Shaila’s grandmother, Kusum also abandons her living daughter to “withdraw from the world” and live like a Hindu widow. Unlike Kusum, Shaila escapes the boundaries of patriarchal Hindu society. The process, however, as in other Mukherjee’s characters’ lives, is a complex struggle. Her memories and longing for the past pursue her for a long time. Actually, there is not much difference between Kusum’s “mindless mortification” (189) and hers. Only at the end of the story does her final liberation have effect. She listens to her family’s voices and symbolically discards the package to finally start a life of her own. Curiously enough, the tragedy is the causal agency of her final transmutation, which leads her to re-examine her previous patriarchal life. At this point we might remember William Carlos Williams’ famous statement that “destruction and creation are simultaneous” (Spring and All 213). At the end of the story, it can be observed that Shaila is spiritually reborn as a new woman, as is symbolized by her dropping of a package on a bench: The voices and the shapes and the nights filled with visions ended up abruptly several weeks ago. I take it as a sign….Then as I stood in the path looking north to Queen’s Park and west to the university, I heard voices of my family one last time. Your time has come, they said. Go, be brave. I do not know where this vogage I have begun will end. I do not know which direction I will take. I dropped the package on a park bench and started walking. (196-197) Also, in “The Management of Grief,” as was previously stated, Mukherjee illustrates her defence of assimilation. While frequently this concept holds negative connotations, the writer is here only concerned with the positive aspects of assimilation.20 In other words, Mukherjee praises the immigrant’s urge for adaptation and resilience in the host culture 20 A significant nuance to Mukherjee’s defence of cultural assimilation in the US is the one that Sharmani P. Gabriel offers in the following lines: “…it is not so much the US as precise geo-political territory that Mukherjee valorises as the site of cultural change and identity transformation in her narratives of diaspora. Rather, it is the dynamics of fluidity and contingency inherent in the melting pot that are able to offer Mukherjee what she herself calls the metaphors and symbolic location necessary for reinscribing cultural citizenship and national belonging in her fiction ( para. 9). Moreover, in 1984, Uma Parameswaran had already affirmed that the process of assimilation was the natural phenomenon that was taking place in Canada, specifically in Manitoba, and predominantly, among the younger generations of Indian immigrants: “The situation is fraught with paradox. On the one hand, the mosaic requires separate ethnocultural identities. On the other hand, there is an overwhelming urge, especially in the younger generation, to be accepted, and one of the easiest ways is to assimilate” (“The Why of Manitoba’s Mosaic” 68). Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.72-92, ISSN 2339-8523 87 BHARATI MUKHERJEE’S STRUGGLE ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------rather than stagnating in the cultural, psychological and political ties of the home culture, discarding, in so doing, the Canadian “mosaic”21 for America’s “melting pot.” However, an important detail to be taken into account is the prevailing inconsistency between Mukherjee’s personal history and her building of fictional characters. Most of them are working class, that is, they are not blessed with Mukherjee’s social privileges and yet they frequently succeed sooner or later in the host country. As Brewster states, it seems that “class, racial, and ethnic differences are elided in Mukherjee’s equation of her own experience with that of immigrants generally” (18). This trend is especially visible in her immigrant phrase, and it seems it does not even matter where these characters come from. As was previously mentioned, in this second period of her career, the protagonists of her work not only come from India, but also from different places of the world, western as well as eastern: Italy, Afghanistan, Philippines, Iraq, Vietnam, even Africa. In other words, it seems that Mukherjee generalizes the immigrant’s experience to such a degree that all of them seem to be equal, and especially similar to herself. The writer then stereotypes the immigrant experience, reducing it very often to an exotic or romantic adventure: the individual’s struggle towards the forging of a new cultural self. Having the personality of a “greedy battler” appears to be the only prerequisite her characters must possess to become “new pioneers,”22 without taking into consideration, at least in a wholly coherent way, issues like class, race or ethnicity.23 To conclude, it can be stated that some of Mukherjee’s female characters, especially those belonging to her later works, migrate across land in search of a new self and 21 Mukherjee’s discord with the Canadian multicultural mosaic is founded on her belief that it does not confer the same rights to all of Canada’s citizens. Sharmani P. Gabriel explains: “Mukherjee’s repudiation of the cultural narrative of the Canadian nation is based on her argument that the terms of liberal multiculturalism, where cultural difference is acknowledged and accommodated within the mosaic of national culture, are simply another way of entrenching separateness and marginalizing those not recognized as belonging to the dominant culture.” In addition to this, Mukherjee suggests that the conception of Canadian multiculturalism “denies the presence of ambivalence or hybridity through its assertion of superficial pluralism and its belief in the existence of clear boundaries between cultures. In such a multicultural nation, differences are organized into neat, virtual grids of distinct ethnic communities, each with its own culture” (qtd. in Gabriel para. 27). 22 As Mukherjee likes to call her main characters throughout the construction of her personal mythology. Other names she uses are “conqueror” or “minor hero” (Vignisson para.16). 23 That’s the reason why we do not totally agree with Mukherjee’s following declaration: “I’m nosey, as a writer. If I have decided to write about a person from a particular region or class then I will make sure I have every detail of speech, mannerisms, clothing, of trivia, sociology at my finger tips in order that just the right detail comes out at the right time” (Vignisson para. 67). 88 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.72-92, ISSN 2339-8523 Mª LUZ GONZÁLEZ & JUAN IGNACIO OLIVA ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------definition. Mukherjee stresses their quality as battlers; they are moved by their instinct to improve their lives. America (understood as the United States) is thus presented as the land of opportunity and success, where immigrants can gradually abandon their hybrid condition. Mukherjee redefines the notion of diaspora as a beneficial process for the immigrant. Instead of giving rise to displacement and dispossession, her immigrant characters are frequently eager to “cross and recross multiple borders of language, history, race, time and culture” (Gabriel para. 5). Their transformation becomes “genetic” rather than hyphenated (Jasmine 222), that is, the emergent American identity resulting from multiculturalism in Mukherjee’s fiction is genetically distinct, new and unrecognizable (Gabriel para. 10). Their transformation is, in the main, a transformation of the mind, a construction of new mindscapes, an invention of new lands, as Mukherjee herself formulates in the following quotation: I do want my characters to be seen as inventing their own Americas and Canadas. The breaking away from rigidly predictable lives frees them to invent more satisfying pasts, and gives them a chance to make their futures in ways that they could not have in the Old World. We’re talking, then, about re-location as a positive act. In immigrating, my characters become creators. By creating they become more real to themselves, instead of unreal. (Hancock 44) India is now a distant homeland to which they are sentimentally attached, but there is no real desire for permanent return (Intro. to Darkness 4). More than a geographical entity, “it becomes,” as Uma Parameswaran sustains, “a metaphysical reality” (“Diaspora Consciousness” 205). However, something to be taken into consideration is the fact that Mukherjee’s vision of America is, as Brewster suggests, “hyperreal,” her “neo-nationalism is nostalgic and fills the absence of the real in the current demise and crisis of America’s global power” (para. 5). In other words, she idealizes the “real” to construct her personal and literary immigrant cosmos; a “personal mythology of immigration and assimilation” (Brewster para. 4), created out of her numerous autobiographical or pseudo-biographical writings. Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.72-92, ISSN 2339-8523 89 BHARATI MUKHERJEE’S STRUGGLE ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WORKS CITED ACIMAN, ANDRÉ, ed. (1997). Letters of Transit. Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language and Loss. New York: The New Press. “BALKANIZATION.” (2010). Encyclopaedia Britannica. 2010. Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. 19 June, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/50223/Balkanization. BREWSTER, ANNE (1993). “A Critique of Bharati Mukherjee’s Neo-nationalism”. Vijay Mishra, ed. Journal of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies 34-35. Web. 06 Dec. 2008. CIRLOT, J. E.(2002). A Dictionary of Symbols. Trad. Jack Sage. 1971. New York: Dover Publications. CONNELL, MICHAEL, JESSIE GREARSON, AND TOM GRIMES (1990). “An Interview with Bharati Mukherjee.” Iowa Review, Fall: 7-32. CHEN, TINE AND S. X. GOUDIE (1987). “Holders of the Word: An Interview with Bharati Mukherjee.” n.p. Web 07 Jan. 2009. http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/vli l/Bharat.htm DESAI, SHEFALI AND TONY BARNSTONE (1998). “A Usable Past: An Interview with Bharati Mukherjee.” Manoa 10.2, Winter: 130-147. DRAKE, JENNIFER (1999). “Looting American Culture: Bharati Mukherjee’s Immigrant Narratives”, Contemporary Literature 40.1, Spring: 60-84. ESTERBAUER, VERENA (2008). The Immigrant’s Search for Identity in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine and Desirable Daughters. Saarbrücken: Verlag Dr. Müller. GABRIEL, SHARMANI PATRICIA (2005). “’Between Mosaic and Melting Pot’: Negotiating Multiculturalism and Cultural Citizenship in Bharati Mukherjee’s Narratives of Diaspora.” Postcolonial Text 1.2. Web. 05 Dec. 2008. http://journals.sfu.ca/pocol/index.php/pct/article/viewArticle/420/147 GAD, IRENE (1994). Tarot and Individuation. Correspondences with Cabala and Alchemy. York Beach, Maine: Nicholas-Hays. HANCOCK, GEOFF (1987). “An Interview with Bharati Mukherjee”. Canadian Fiction Magazine 64: 30-44. 90 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.72-92, ISSN 2339-8523 Mª LUZ GONZÁLEZ & JUAN IGNACIO OLIVA ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------HUSTED, BRYAN W. (2001). “Cultural Balkanization and Hybridization in an Era of Globalization: Implications for International Business Research.” January. Web. 20 Jun 2010. http://egade.itesm.mx/investigation/documents/documents/8egade_ husted.polf. KOIKE, RIE (2009). “’Tornado[s]’ with the Initial ‘J’: The Meaning of Chaos Theory in http://www.lang.nagoyaMukherjee’s Jasmine. Web. 07 Jan. u.ac.jp/~nagahata/amlitchubu/journal/koike.html KOSTER, RAPHAEL (2009). “Insecurities and Hope: Bharati Mukherjee’s Hybrids and the Role of Divider/Bridge”. Ralph Koster’s Website. Copyright 1998-2008. Web. 20 Apr. 2009. http://www.raphkoster.com/stories/index.shtml “THE MANAGEMENT OF GRIEF (THEMES).” (2009). *otes on Short Stories. Answers Corporation, Answers.com. Web. 20 April 2009. http://www.answers.com/topic/themanagement-of-grief-story-3 MOYERS, BILL (2003). “Bill Moyers interviews Bharati Mukherjee.” PBS. 20 Jun. Web. 03 Feb. 2009. http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_mukherjee.html MUKHERJEE, BHARATI (1981). “An Invisible Woman.” Saturday *ight, 96: 36-40. ---------------------------- (1985). Introduction. Darkness. Markham: Penguin: 1-4. ---------------------------- (1988). The Middleman and Other Stories. New York: Grove Press. ---------------------------- (1989). Jasmine. London: Virago Press, 1991. “A FOUR-HUNDRED-YEAR-OLD WOMAN.” (1991). The Writer on Her Work: *ew Essays in *ew Territory, ed. Janet Sternburg. Vol 2. New York: W.W. Norton: 33-38. ----------------------------- (1996). “Beyond Multiculturalism: Surviving the Nineties.” Journal of Modern Literature XX.1, Summer: 29-34. ------------------------------ (1997). “American Dreamer.” MotherJones Magazine, Jan/Feb: 1-6. ------------------------------ (1997). “Imagining Homelands.” In Letters of Transit. Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language and Loss. in Aciman, ed: 65-86. PARAMESWARAN, UMA (2007). “Diaspora Consciousness. Going Beyond the Hyphen without Erasing It.” In Parameswaran: 204-207. Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.72-92, ISSN 2339-8523 91 BHARATI MUKHERJEE’S STRUGGLE ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- (2007). “Ganga in the Assiniboine. Prospects for Indo-Canadian Literature.” In Parameswaran: 70-91. ----------------------------- (2007). “Home is Where Your Feet are, and May Your Heart be There Too!” In Parameswaran: 204-217. ----------------------------- (2007).“The Why of Manitoba’s Mosaic” (first offered as a plenary lecture at Bemidji State University on April 26, 1984). In Parameswaran: 5469. ----------------------------- (2007). “What Price Expatriation.” In Parameswaran: 20-36. ----------------------------- (2007). Writing the Diaspora. Essays on Culture and Identity. Jaipur: Rawat Publications. RABAN, JONATHAN (1988). “Savage Boulevards, Easy Streets. Review of Bharati Mukherjee’s The Middleman and Other Stories. The *ew York Times. *ytmes.com. 19 Jun. Web. 04 Dec. 2008. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html SANT-WADE ARVINDRA AND KAREN MARGUERITE RADELL (1992). “Refashioning the SelfImmigrant Women in Bharati Mukherjee’s New World.” Studies in Short Fiction 29.1, Winter: 11-17. VIGNISSON, RUMAR (1993). “Bharati Mukherjee: an Interview.” SPA*. Journal of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies. 3435. Diasporas, ed. Vijay Mishra. Web. 13 Jun. 2010. http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/ReadingRoom/litserv/SPAN/34.html WILLIAMS, WILLIAM CARLOS (1923). Spring and All. Paris: Contact Publishing. 92 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.72-92, ISSN 2339-8523 Indi@logs Vol 2 2015, pp. 93-113, ISSN: 2339-8523 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------LA IDIA PARA LAS MASAS: LO TÍPICO Y LO TÓPICO E LOS MURALES DE LA EXPOSICIÓ ITERACIOAL DEL GOLDE GATE (1939-1940) MARISA PEIRÓ MÁRQUEZ Universidad de Zaragoza [email protected] Recibido: 31-07-2014 Aceptado: 19-01-2015 RESUME Este artículo trata sobre la representación de la India en los murales de la Exposición Internacional del Golden Gate (1939-1940) de San Francisco y sobre los códigos y ejemplos que utilizó su autor, Miguel Covarrubias, para presentar al público norteamericano general los pueblos, el arte, las viviendas y transportes, la flora y la fauna y la economía del subcontinente indio. PALABRAS CLAVE: mapas, representaciones simbólicas, caricatura, Estados Unidos, entreguerras, tópicos, exposiciones universales e internacionales, Miguel Covarrubias ABSTRACT India for the Masses: the Typical and the Topical at the Golden Gate International Exhibition of Murals (1939-1940) This paper deals with the representation of India at San Francisco’s Golden Gate International Exhibition of murals (1939-1940) and the codes and examples used by the author Miguel Covarrubias to show the massive North American audience the people, the art, the native dwellings and means of transportation, the flora and the fauna and the economy of the Indian subcontinent. KEYWORDS: maps, symbolic representations, caricature, United States, Interwar period, topics, International and Universal Exhibitions, Miguel Covarrubias Introducción La Exposición Internacional del Golden Gate tuvo lugar en San Francisco en 1939 y 1940 (se prolongó debido a su gran éxito), y, a pesar de haber coincidido en el tiempo con la Exposición General de Nueva York, constituyó uno de los principales eventos de la historia de la ciudad, siendo también una de las más exitosas de toda la historia de Norteamérica. En la exposición de San Francisco, la India y su representación apenas entraban de refilón, pues el tema principal de la misma era el “esplendor del Pacífico” (así se ha LA INDIA PARA LAS MASAS ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------traducido al español el Pageant of the Pacific original). Se trataba, por lo tanto, de ofrecer todo un verdadero “desfile” de las bondades y beldades de los pueblos que habitaban tanto dentro como en los límites de este océano, que se entendía por primera vez como un nexo de unión –un nexo era igualmente la construcción del Golden Gate, teóricamente el objeto de celebración original– entre los pueblos del mundo y, lo que es más importante, entre sus respectivas industrias.1 En el recinto de la exposición, situado en la isla artificial de Treasure Island, se combinaban exposiciones de carácter artístico y etnográfico con demostraciones de carácter científico y técnico, las cuales estaban acompañadas de toda una serie de actividades recreativas y lúdicas que hicieron que el lugar se considerase durante un tiempo como un colosal parque de atracciones, que recibió más de diecisiete millones de visitas de durante dos temporadas seguidas. Fueron muchos los países, regiones, artistas2 y visitantes que acudieron a la llamada de los organizadores. Junto con la colosal estatua Pacífica de Ralph Stackpole, las obras más visitadas y recordadas de la exposición fueron los seis murales que bajo el título “El esplendor del Pacífico”, pintó el artista y antropólogo mexicano Miguel Covarrubias (1904-1957) entre 1938 y 1939 – asistido en su ejecución por Antonio Ruiz, más conocido como “El Corcito”. En estos murales, que abarcaban los continentes de Asia, América y Oceanía, la India tuvo apenas una pequeña pero interesante representación, constituyendo una rara avis dentro de la exposición, que marginó la inclusión de la India tanto por su delimitación geográfica – se trataba, no olvidemos, de una exaltación del Pacífico – como por diversos motivos sociopolíticos. El Asia de Covarrubias terminaba precisamente en el río Indo, y es esta idea de la India como frontera, como limes, la que permite comprender mejor el escaso interés por la India del norteamericano medio al que iba dirigida esta exposición. 1 El discurso Pan-Pacífico en las exposiciones internacionales había comenzado, de manera decisiva, con la Exposición Internacional de Seattle de 1909 (la Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exhibition), que presentaba la cultura de los nuevos territorios adquiridos por los Estados Unidos, como Filipinas, Alaska y Hawái; el discurso continuaría a través de otras exposiciones, como la Panama-Pacific International Exhibition de 1915 de San Francisco, para culminar de forma apoteósica en la que nos concierne, que hablaría de los pueblos del Pacífico como motor económico de la costa Oeste. No es casualidad que esta última coincidiese en el tiempo, oportunamente, tanto con la Política Panamericana del Buen Vecino de Roosevelt como con los crecientes intereses militares y comerciales de Estados Unidos en el Pacífico ante el preocupante avance japonés. 2 Además de Miguel Covarrubias, a cuya intervención dedicamos este artículo, participaron también artistas como Helen Forbes, Dorothy Puccineli, Poole, Bergman, Hugo Ballin, Millard Sheets, Armin Hansen, L. Stoll, las hermanas Bruton, Maynard Dixon, Herman Voltz, Lucien Labaudt, Marian Simpson, Edgar D. Taylor, Hilaire Hiler, Arturo Sotomayor y José Moya del Pino. A partir de 1940 estaría también presente Diego Rivera. (Anaya Dávila & de María y Campos, 2006: 29-30). 94 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.93-113, ISSN 2339-8523 MARISA PEIRÓ MÁRQUEZ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Sin embargo, estas representaciones revisten un enorme interés, en tanto que constituyen una serie de iconografías algo arquetípicas pero profundamente estudiadas, que emanan de un artista cultivado – y con especial sensibilidad por la temática asiática– y de una serie de prestigiosos colaboradores, realizadas con un claro afán divulgador, y en tanto que estas mismas constituyen, tanto por su configuración como por su trascendencia, toda una serie de hitos referenciales en la formación de una idea mental de la India para gran parte del variado y abundante público que visitó la exposición. Los murales Cuando Philip N. Youtz, encargado del Pabellón del Pacífico, que habría de albergar los citados murales, buscaba a un artista competente y apasionado para la realización de los mapas, rápidamente pensó en Miguel Covarrubias, debido a su “sensibilidad (…) y su conocimiento apasionado y sensible de las diversas culturas del mundo.” (García Noriega y Nieto, 1987: 123). En aquellos momentos Covarrubias era uno de los artistas figurativos más reconocidos y mejor pagados de Norteamérica, especialmente por sus asiduas colaboraciones para publicaciones como Vogue, The (ew Yorker, Harpers’ Baazar, Collier’s, Time, Life o Fortune y por los libros que había ilustrado para editoriales tan célebres como Covici-Friede, A. Knopf o la Limited Editions Club de Heritage Press. Especialmente conocido como caricaturista social y muy implicado en el Renacimiento de Harlem, Covarrubias vivía en aquellos momentos su época de mayor fama, pues acababa de publicarse su estudio ilustrado Island of Bali (1937), que había desatado una auténtica “balimanía” entre los estadounidenses – tres ediciones se agotaron en pocas semanas, y algunos grandes almacenes vendieron para la ocasión diseños balineses – y que todavía en la fecha de hoy constituye una de las publicaciones angulares sobre la isla de Bali. Fue precisamente gracias a esta, financiada por una beca de la Fundación Guggenheim, cuando la vida y la obra de Covarrubias dieron un giro definitivo hacia algunas grandes pasiones que culminarían en las últimas décadas de su vida: la pintura, la cartografía y la antropología/etnología.3 3 Aunque existen numerosas publicaciones sobre la vida y obra de Covarrubias, la más completa de ellas es la biografía de Williams (1994), que utilizamos como obra de referencia. Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.93-113, ISSN 2339-8523 95 LA INDIA PARA LAS MASAS ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Covarrubias aceptó el encargo en 1938, partiendo en septiembre de ese mismo año a San Francisco, quizás esperando acumular fama y dinero en la costa Oeste. (Anaya Dávila & de María y Campos, 2006: 21).4 Fueron Rene d’Harnoncourt y Moisés Saenz, con quienes mantenía una estrecha relación, quienes le convencieron para participar en el proyecto; Covarrubias aceptaría el encargo una vez que Sáenz le hiciera ver que los mapas serían “una instructiva descripción de la verdad sociológica mediante el arte” (Anaya Dávila & de María y Campos, 2006: 22). En un principio, se pensó en realizar ocho grandes murales, que finalmente fueron seis,5 ejecutados mediante la innovadora técnica de “fresco en laca”6 sobre madera, y que se colocarían en el Pabellón del Pacífico de la exposición: dos de ellos (Los medios de transporte y Las viviendas nativas, de 274 x 396 cm cada uno) irían en el vestíbulo y cuatro en la planta principal (Los pueblos, Las manifestaciones de arte, La economía y La fauna y la flora, de 457 x 732 cm cada uno). El contrato de Covarrubias incluía mil dólares mensuales, alojamiento, transporte, materiales, ayudantes y todo el equipo cultural necesario (Anaya Dávila & de María y Campos, 2006: 23), en el que se incluían los colaboradores Walter Goldschmidt, Pardee Lowe, el doctor A. L. Kroeber, el doctor Carl Sauer, René d’Harnouncourt, Eric Douglas y Philip N. Youtz (Anaya Dávila & de María y Campos, 2006: 36). Miguel Covarrubias y “El Corcito”7 invertirían unos tres meses en realizar los murales (Anaya Dávila & de María y Campos, 2006: 25). Para ello, Covarrubias partía de una proyección de Van der Grinten proporcionada por Carl Sauer, reproduciendo después el mapa sobre pequeños bloques de argamasa y realizando las figuras según la ya mencionada técnica del “fresco en laca”. Utilizando su peculiar estilo cartográfico,8 en 4 Existe una breve pero bellamente ilustrada publicación dedicada a la estancia de Covarrubias en San Francisco, fruto de una exposición reciente de los murales (Contreras & Dahlhaus, 2007). 5 Se fusionaron el de la fauna y la flora y se eliminó el de la historia, que hubiera resultado demasiado complejo. (Anaya Dávila & de María y Campos, 2006: 24). 6 “Los murales (…) fueron pintados con una nueva técnica que usaba laca lisa con una base de nitrocelusosa. El pigmento puro y seco se aplicaba con laca transparente diluida con disolvente. Cada brochazo hacía penetrar las partículas de color en la base de nitrocelusosa que instantáneamente se disolvía en una manera similar al fresco; es decir, “un fresco” en laca en vez del típico yeso. El resultado era una superficie de brillantes colores, transparente, lavable y durable”. (Anaya Dávila & de María y Campos, 2006: 124). 7 Antonio M. Ruíz (1892-1964), apodado “El Corcito” en honor a un famoso torero, fue un pintor y escenógrafo mexicano, del mismo ambiente cultural que Miguel Covarrubias, que desarrolló casi toda su carrera en México y se especializó en escenas urbanas. También ejerció como docente en la célebre escuela “La Esmeralda”. 8 Vinculado desde muy temprana edad a la cartografía (trabajó como cartógrafo en la Secretaría de Educación Pública) (García Noriega y Nieto, 1987: 120), Covarrubias realizaría a lo largo de su vida más 96 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.93-113, ISSN 2339-8523 MARISA PEIRÓ MÁRQUEZ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------estos seis murales, Covarrubias “proyecta las necesidades socioeconómicas y espirituales de las comunidades del Pacífico y delinea las necesidades comunales de todos los grupos humanos por medio de una precisa observación y representaciones minuciosas de elementos culturales materiales”. (Anaya Dávila & de María y Campos, 2006: 124). Covarrubias y la India A pesar de las fuertes vinculaciones que Covarrubias mantuvo con otros lugares del continente asiático como Bali (Williams y Chong, 2005) o China (Peiró Márquez, 2013), la India no constituyó para el mexicano un gran referente iconográfico ni personal; sin embargo, no deberíamos olvidarnos de sus vinculaciones con una élite intelectual mucho más preocupada e implicada en la actualidad india, pues escribió varios artículos para la revista Asia y mantuvo un estrecho contacto con algunos de sus colaboradores. Asia, la publicación científica divulgativa – también de contenidos políticos – de temática asiática con mayor impacto en Norteamérica durante las décadas de los 20 y los 30, fue una de las pocas que prestó gran atención a la India, contando entre sus colaboradores con personalidades de la talla de Jawaharlal Nehru o Gertrude Emerson Sen. En este entorno, Williams (1994: 303) cita la amistad del matrimonio Covarrubias con Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit – hermana de Nehru y que ocupó importantes cargos políticos –, a la que sitúa junto a otras celebridades visitando la casa del matrimonio en Tizapán en la década de los 40 (Williams, 1994: 191); años más tarde, su hermana Krishna Nehru Hutheesing y su hija Nayantara Sahgal visitarían también a Rosa Covarrubias, ya viuda (Williams (1994: 303). Aunque Covarrubias nunca visitó la India y sus habitantes apenas atrajeron su atención iconográfica hasta la realización de estos murales, sí podemos encontrar entre su obras algunas excepciones, como las figuras de dos sikhs – un Maharajá (Vanity Fair, 1927: 36) y un Swami (Vanity Fair, 1928b: 60), respectivamente – de corte satírico que aparecieron en las páginas de Vanity Fair o una caricaturas de líderes políticos como de una treintena de mapas artísticos, tanto en formato mural (además de los que aquí tratamos, realizó otros cuatro mapas murales) como sobre papel (realizó mapas para las ilustraciones de al menos ocho libros, gouaches, folletos, carteles e ilustraciones para revistas). (Anaya Dávila & de María y Campos, 2006: 25-26). Según Azuela de la Cueva (2007, p. 1276), en una opinión que no compartimos, y citando una conferencia de Fausto Ramírez, el particular estilo de mural cartográfico-didáctico de Covarrubias habría tenido su origen en el modelo utilizado por Roberto Montenegro en el mural de la Biblioteca Iberoamericana. Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.93-113, ISSN 2339-8523 97 LA INDIA PARA LAS MASAS ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Mohandas Gandhi (Vanity Fair, 1930: 56) o Subhas Chandra Bose, que apareció en Collier’s en 1944. Estas imágenes dan idea de la aislada presencia india en el imaginario de las revistas ilustradas norteamericanas, en el que solo resultan relevantes en cuanto a que curiosidades exóticas revestidas de cierto lujo y, en menor medida, como personalidades políticas emergentes. La India en los mapas murales de Covarrubias Una vez mencionado el contexto general de creación de los murales y de la, en teoría, limitada relación de Covarrubias con las representaciones de la India, pasamos a analizar el contenido referente a las culturas del subcontinente indio en los mismos. Antes de ello, debemos advertir que existieron dos versiones idénticas de los murales: las ya mencionadas, realizadas sobre “el fresco en laca” y expuestas en la exposición de San Francisco, y una edición limitada en papel, realizada al año siguiente y que incluía un prólogo en el que Covarrubias ofrecía ciertas explicaciones y consideraciones sobre la leyenda de los mapas y, en ocasiones, sobre los motivos de elección de unos determinados elementos (Covarrubias, 1940).9 Esta edición, muy apreciada por coleccionistas por su enorme detalle y calidad, es, por tanto, nuestra fuente primaria de estudio, tanto por sus representaciones gráficas - especialmente si tenemos en cuenta que uno de los murales se encuentra en paradero desconocido10 - como por el texto del propio Covarrubias. Dichos murales permiten a Covarrubias combinar sus habilidades pictóricas con sus incipientes inquietudes como antropólogo y museólogo, pues en ellos prima el afán divulgativo, especialmente claro y compartimentado (a veces incluso de manera artificiosa). Ybarra-Frausto definió con exactitud la esencia de los mapas de Covarrubias: Entre los cartógrafos modernos, Miguel Covarrubias ha hecho contribuciones especiales y duraderas. En sus mapas, los datos se embellecen con elementos pictóricos para crear una topografía expresiva, un terreno tanto científico como imaginativo, añadiendo al 9 El texto estuvo asesorado por Carl Sauer y Alfred L. Kroeber. El mismo sería traducido al español, acompañado de un breve estudio sobre el contexto de producción de los murales (Anaya Dávila & de María y Campos, 2006). La edición original (Covarrubias, 1940) no tiene paginación, lo que puede dificultar la identificación de las citas. No obstante, el texto puede consultarse en su totalidad en la Colección de David Rumsey, y está disponible online aquí. 10 El mural de Las manifestaciones de arte tuvo un destino funesto, pues está en paradero desconocido desde 1959. La obra pudo perderse en las bodegas del Museo Americano de Historia Natural, cosa que parece improbable, o en el envío y recepción para ser instalada en el Ferry Building de San Francisco. (Anaya Dávila & de María y Campos, 2006: 32). 98 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.93-113, ISSN 2339-8523 MARISA PEIRÓ MÁRQUEZ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------aspecto funcional de la cartografía una visión estética personal. Con el rigor y la exactitud de un etnólogo y la originalidad y sensibilidad de un pintor y artista gráfico, Covarrubias ofrece nuevas perspectivas y establece una nueva categoría de mapas pictóricos. (García Noriega y Nieto, 1987: 119-120). Así, en ellos Covarrubias “incorpora imaginación artística a las necesidades científicas de la delimitación de espacios” (Anaya Dávila & de María y Campos, 2006: 122) y “crea un modo de representación usando signos diminutos que proyectan información cultural” (Anaya Dávila & de María y Campos, 2006: 122). Es precisamente esta información cultural que se proyecta la que pretendemos reunir en nuestro estudio. En nuestro análisis nos ocupamos únicamente de los elementos con los que Covarrubias “proyecta información” sobre la India, aunque por coherencia cultural e histórica trataremos igualmente las iconografías con las que se representa a la zona limítrofe, las actuales Paquistán, Bangladesh, Nepal y Sri Lanka.11 Ya en el prólogo de los mismos, Covarrubias advierte sobre la importancia de la prevalencia de los dibujos sobre la exactitud geográfica y política,12 justificando quizás con esto sus generalizaciones; no debemos olvidar que estuvieron pensados para que un público general, esencialmente norteamericano y con poca educación específica al respecto, pudiera aprender sobre los pueblos de América, Asia y Oceanía. Para una sociedad que acusaba episodios tanto de indofilia como de indofobia mucho más relajados que el mundo británico, la inclusión de la India en estos murales resultaba un punto de inflexión importante, puesto que para muchas personas debieron ser una primera toma de contacto con la cultura y economía del país, permitiéndoles adquirir una serie de conocimientos sobre la India y su etnografía, en un momento en el que la actualidad india gozó de una gran importancia en el panorama internacional.13 11 Todas las imágenes que aquí utilizamos y reproducimos pertenecen a la colección de mapas de David Rumsey, y pueden consultarse digitalizadas con gran detalle en el siguiente sitio web: http://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/s/8183mv 12 “Aunque los datos geográficos y políticos se han hecho a un lado para dejar espacio a los dibujos”. (Covarrubias, 1940). 13 Coincidiendo con la declaración de guerra de Inglaterra a Alemania que afecta a la India como colonia de la primera, se trata de un momento de fuertes tensiones y acciones independentistas, muy bien manifestadas en las elecciones provinciales de 1936 (las primeras realizadas tras la Government of India Act de 1935), y que concedieron con una aplastante victoria al Congreso Nacional Indio. Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.93-113, ISSN 2339-8523 99 LA INDIA PARA LAS MASAS ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Por otra parte, con sus más y sus menos,14 no debemos olvidar que, aunque por lo general fue un adelantado a su tiempo en muchas de sus teorías, Covarrubias es todavía un “antropólogo romántico” (Medina, 1976), y que es en el sentido de una antropología didáctica de cierto tono sentimental – coincidente en el tiempo con sus crecientes apetencias antropológicas y docentes – en el que debemos entender sus aportaciones al conocimiento popular etnográfico. Quizás por ello, la verdadera novedad de los murales no sea únicamente la concreta tipología estética que después sería tan imitada,15 sino las conciliadoras intenciones de su autor. 16 1. Los Pueblos Precisamente por su complejidad e implicaciones, el mural que se ocupa de Los Pueblos es uno de los más controvertidos, debido tanto al uso de una teoría racial algo obsoleta como a la reiteración de unos clichés iconográficos procedentes del mundo de la fotografía decimonónica. Con la elección de determinados pueblos como representativos de sus lugares de origen, Covarrubias intenta “mostrar los territorios ocupados por estos grupos raciales, así como los tipos fisionómicos más representativos de los pueblos coloridos y variados” (Covarrubias, 1940). Para Covarrubias y sus asesores, existen en la India representantes de los tres tipos de razas: la mongoloide, la caucasoide y la negroide.17 En el caso de la primera, el autor comenta que además de los colonizadores “(…) desde la antigüedad ha habido residentes caucasoides asiáticos en el norte de la India, tales como los morenos y barbados panjabi, rajput, kashmiri y los sikh” (Covarrubias, 1940). En la zona ocupada por los caucasoides (el norte de la India y el sur de Sri Lanka), 14 Covarrubias mantiene una teoría de razas bastante anticuada para la época, aunque sí que utiliza el emergente concepto de “área cultural”, que toma de Kroeber. 15 El estilo cartográfico de Covarrubias tuvo una gran trascendencia, especialmente en los Estados Unidos y en México, donde podemos cuantificar su influencia desde el mundo de la publicidad, el ocio, el cine y la animación: de los mapas publicitarios de la Hawaiian Pineapple Company a las películas de Disney Saludos Amigos (1942) y Los Tres Caballeros (1944), son numerosas las manifestaciones culturales que acusan notables deudas de los planteamientos de Covarrubias. Para una explicación más detallada véase Peiró Márquez (2013: 85) 16 “El océano Pacífico se ha considerado, en el imaginario popular (…) como una barrera en vez de lo que en realidad es: una ruta para que todos los pueblos, culturas y economías nacionales que pertenecen al área del Pacífico se comuniquen entre sí.” (Covarrubias, 1940). 17 Covarrubias utiliza en el mural una teoría racial algo obsoleta: aquella que indicaba que en el ser humano existían únicamente tres razas – la mongoloide, la caucasoide y la negroide– y sus respectivas mezclas, división que, sin embargo, había sido aprobada por Kroeber. (Anaya Dávila & de María y Campos, 2006: 27). Términos como “caucasoide”, “negroide” o “raza dravidiana” son empleados en la traducción al español y los utilizamos por respeto a su autor. 100 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.93-113, ISSN 2339-8523 MARISA PEIRÓ MÁRQUEZ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------representada con el color rosa, y sin que coincida con su texto, sitúa respectivamente a los maratha, los gujarati, los punjabíes, los sindhi, los sikh y los cingaleses, siendo estos dos últimos los elegidos para una representación icónica. En el caso del sikh, que es el único al que Covarrubias dedica unas líneas en el texto (“un sacerdote sikh con capa roja, turbante, rosario y estola característicos de cierta casta (…)”, Covarrubias, 1940), este sigue la iconografía habitual y es visualmente similar a los ya comentados ejemplos de la Vanity Fair.18 Más curiosa resulta la representación del cingalés, para la que Covarrubias elige a un bailarín kandyano, representado con la vestimenta tradicional para el baile – conocida como “ves”–, compuesta de un tocado elaborado, una red de cuentas que cubre el pecho, una vistosa falda en color blanco y tobilleras metálicas. Posiblemente, esta elección esté relacionada con la pasión de Covarrubias por la danza;19 asimismo, los bailarines kandyanos representaban un tipo etnográfico más que reconocible, pues fueron durante mucho tiempo la figura cingalesa más conocida por público general, desde que en el siglo XIX el empresario circense alemán Carl Hagenbeck los incluyese en sus zoos humanos; a finales del siglo XIX y a principios del XX se convertirían en un reclamo popular de las “exposiciones etnográficas” (especialmente, exposiciones internacionales y universales) (de Zoete, 1954). Dentro de la raza negroide, Covarrubias incluye a los dravidianos del sur de la India, como los tamiles, a los que cita y representa (Covarrubias, 1940). En el mapa sitúa también bajo esta misma raza a los habitantes del sur y el este de la India, como los munda kol, los telugu, los toda y los rond, los citados tamiles y a los bengalíes (de ellos dice que “son de sangre mixta mongoloide y dravidiana”, Covarrubias, 1940), además de los vedda del norte de Sri Lanka. Sus elecciones iconográficas corresponden en este caso a tamiles, bengalíes y vedda. 18 En las tres ocasiones los personajes aparecen representados con la piel bastante oscura, barbados y tocados con turbante a la manera tradicional. 19 Covarrubias fue, durante los años finales de su vida, director de la sección de danza del Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes de México, en la época conocida como la “edad de oro de la danza mexicana,” y bajo cuyo cargo se llevaron a cabo numerosos y célebres ballets como Zapata o Los Cuatro Soles, para muchos de los cuales diseñó vestuario y escenografía y que llegó a sufragar de su propio bolsillo. (Navarrete, 1993; Williams, 1994). Además, a lo largo de su obra se encuentran diseminadas ingentes representaciones de la danza y los bailarines de muy diferentes lugares del mundo, teniendo especial importancia las afroamericanos, istmeños (de Tehuantepec) y balineses, aunque también representó a bailarines javaneses, birmanos y camboyanos. Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.93-113, ISSN 2339-8523 101 LA INDIA PARA LAS MASAS ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------La más habitual de estas iconografías, la del aguador tamil, sigue los modelos iconográficos por los que se hicieron conocidos en la fotografía de época colonial (delgados, rurales, con la piel muy oscura y apenas vestidos), pero en su faceta de aguador presenta una complejidad: se trata probablemente de un bhisti, figura que no aparece en la sociedad tamil pero sí representada bajo unos mismos presupuestos estéticos en diferentes obras del periodo precedente20 y que era relativamente conocida para el público occidental.21 Para la representación del cazador vedda, es probable que Covarrubias recogiese información del popular libro The Veddas (Seligmann & Seligmann, 1911), que incluía numerosas fotografías sobre este pueblo, definido en el prólogo del libro como “uno de los más primitivos del mundo”, y que en el momento todavía ocupaba gran parte de las selvas de Sri Lanka. Covarrubias adopta aquí la iconografía más característica y reconocible, la del cazador selvático de pelo largo y revuelto, portando un característico arco largo. 20 Entre las parecidas a la figura representada por Covarrubias, destacamos una fotografía de Scott y Weld (1862: 320) y una fotografía de India (1876: 48). 21 Esta figura fue la protagonista de un poema de Rudyard Kipling titulado Gunga Din, que en 1939 dio lugar a una producción cinematográfica del mismo nombre, protagonizada por Cary Grant. 102 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.93-113, ISSN 2339-8523 MARISA PEIRÓ MÁRQUEZ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Figura I. Detalle de “Los Pueblos”. Colección de David Rumsey. La representación de un moderno bengalí reviste un mayor interés iconográfico, en tanto que Covarrubias no presenta un tipo etnográfico recurrente, sino a un ciudadano moderno, cuya representación plástica no estaba todavía demasiado extendida. El bengalí, sentado y en actitud pensativa, representa probablemente a un simpatizante del Movimiento de Independencia Indio, pues además de un panjabi o kurtas sencillo, luce también la prenda conocida como “gorro Gandhi”, utilizada por los afines al movimiento; ambas prendas parecen estar realizadas en khadi, tejido reivindicado por Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.93-113, ISSN 2339-8523 103 LA INDIA PARA LAS MASAS ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------los círculos afines a Gandhi como preceptivo por sus implicaciones industriales locales y como parte del Movimiento Swadeshi (Gonsalves, 2010). Por último, la raza mongoloide, ocupando un color amarillo oscuro, se sitúa en el territorio montañoso al norte del Ganges y perteneciente a Nepal, y está representada por los gurkha, “una tribu guerrera de sangre mixta caucasoide y mongoloide”. (Covarrubias, 1940). Muy interesante, aunque tradicional, es la figura de la gurkha, pues aunque los guerreros gurkhas de Nepal eran bastante populares en Occidente debido a su importante papel en el Raj británico, Covarrubias elige una representación femenina. A grandes rasgos, su iconografía corresponde a la habitual de muchas postales y fotografías de estudio que desde mediados del siglo XIX presentaban al público occidental las “Nepali ladies”, con la cabeza velada y haciendo especial énfasis en las voluminosas joyas que portaban tanto al cuello (siempre con varios y gruesos collares) como en muñecas, orejas y otras perforaciones faciales, que tan singulares resultaban. Los mismos tipos etnográficos continuaban apareciendo en la fotografía postal en la época en la que se realizaron los murales, por lo que no es extraño que alguna de ellas pudiera ser la fuente iconográfica directa para el autor; la novedad es que Covarrubias presenta a la mujer sentada, en actitud relajada, y no posando erguida como solían solicitar los estudios. Lo cierto es que, aunque el mexicano olvida mencionar en su discurso a veddas, cingaleses y no añade descripción alguna sobre la gurkha, el bengalí o el tamil – únicamente se detiene en la descripción del sikh22 –, sus elecciones representan una variada selección dentro de los posibles arquetipos,23 representando tanto a figuras tradicionales dentro de la imaginería colonial como otras de mayor actualidad, ofreciendo al público diferentes facetas de la multiétnica sociedad del Raj Británico. 22 Creemos que los motivos de esto no atañen tanto a su singularidad “caucasoide” –como sí le sucede en la representación del ainu japonés del mismo mural– sino porque posiblemente se tratase de la figura más reconocida y reconocible por el norteamericano de a pie. 23 No debemos olvidar la importancia de los libros de compilaciones sobre diferentes tribus y tipos etnográficos de la India publicados a lo largo de todo el dominio británico. Entre ellos, destacó por su volumen, minuciosidad y calidad de sus abundantes fotografías el de Watson, Kaye y Taylor (18681875). 104 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.93-113, ISSN 2339-8523 MARISA PEIRÓ MÁRQUEZ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------2. Las manifestaciones del arte En el desaparecido mural de Las manifestaciones del arte, el más imitado y admirado de todos ellos,24 se representan, grosso modo, algunas de las manifestaciones artísticas más características de sus respectivos territorios, tanto antiguas como contemporáneas. Desgraciadamente, Covarrubias no presta tanto detalle al arte de la India como al de otras zonas – como la Polinesia o las islas de la actual Indonesia –, probablemente porque, a pesar de su cuidada y entusiasta formación, no se sentía tan cómodo en su explicación o representación. En su texto Covarrubias advierte de las generalizaciones llevadas a cabo en un mapa de tanta complejidad cultural: “existen culturas que han cambiado de forma considerable y que se han desplazado de manera continua, como (…) los habitantes de la India” (Covarrubias, 1940). Figura II. Detalle de “Las manifestaciones del arte”. Colección de David Rumsey. En el caso que nos atañe, Covarrubias utiliza únicamente un par de representaciones icónicas, aunque originalmente planteó también establecer una región artística dedicada al sur de la India, tal y como se aprecia en un mapa preparatorio original (Anaya Dávila & de María y Campos, 2006: 52). En ese caso, las explicaciones son mucho más parcas 24 Gracias a la edición de 1940, este mural se convirtió en toda una referencia dentro de la entonces emergente cultura tiki, debido a sus detalladas y acertadas representaciones del arte polinesio y melanesio, aunque, tal y como sucede con el resto de murales, incluye las representaciones icónicas pertenecientes a un territorio mucho más amplio. Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.93-113, ISSN 2339-8523 105 LA INDIA PARA LAS MASAS ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------que las cuidadas representaciones, que reproducen obras de arte reales, aunque el artista no especifica su fuente. En primer lugar, en la zona septentrional, coloca una miniatura rajputa que representa a una dama sentada y que define como “del norte de la India”. Esta sigue los modelos femeninos idealizados habituales de las escuelas de pintura de la India septentrional de los siglos XVII y XVIII: se presenta a la dama de perfil, llevando un sari tradicional ricamente decorado y un velo azulado semi-transparente; de piel clara y ojos almendrados, aparece sujetando una flor en su mano derecha. Por otra parte, Covarrubias coloca en Sri Lanka una bandera pintada cingalesa, en la que aparece el dios mono Hanúman (Covarrubias, 1940). En este caso, la bandera se trata de la reproducción parcial – y algo más achatada - de una bandera real, estandarte del gremio de los nawandanno.25 La original presenta, enfrentados sobre un fondo de estrellas, a Vishvákarma – dios de los artesanos y arquitectos – y a Hanúman, pero Covarrubias reprodujo únicamente la parte derecha, en la que se encuentra el célebre dios mono sujetando en su mano un arbusto mágico. En la esquina superior izquierda, se encuentra también una representación solar, símbolo habitual de las banderas cingalesas.26 3. Las viviendas nativas El mural Las viviendas nativas es, en general, el más genérico y parco en detalles del conjunto, pero muy especialmente en el caso de la India, a la que Covarrubias dota de un único modelo representativo, del que nos dice que es una casa de techo plano, generalmente de adobe o lodo, característica del norte de la India y del Tíbet. (Covarrubias, 1940). Efectivamente, se trata de una casa tradicional de la región desértica de Thar, en Rajastán, construida en adobe y que tras la techumbre cónica de paja oculta un techo plano. Sin embargo, debemos señalar que Covarrubias coloca geográficamente esta casa en una zona que clasifica como “bengalí”, aunque esto parece obedecer más a una conveniencia espacial que a un error deliberado. 25 Orfebres, pertenecientes a la casta de los súdras (Upham, 1833: 334). Una imagen de la bandera original, así como más información sobre el sentido iconográfico general de la bandera, puede encontrarse en Sunday Observer, 2005. 26 106 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.93-113, ISSN 2339-8523 MARISA PEIRÓ MÁRQUEZ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Figura III. Detalle de “Las viviendas nativas”. Colección de David Rumsey. 4. La fauna y la flora El mural dedicado a La fauna y la flora es igualmente parco en detalles, pues se ve fuertemente complementado por el relativo a la Economía. En él, mediante su habitual sistema de colores, Covarrubias nos representa a India y sus regiones circundantes en diferentes tonos que indican los diversos paisajes: utiliza el verde claro para matorrales y bosques lluviosos, el verde oscuro para los grandes bosques tropicales perennifolios, el amarillo para las praderas y el ocre para desiertos y zonas de maleza – que sitúa en Baluchistán (Covarrubias, 1940). Los animales elegidos como característicos de la India son el elefante (que volverá a aparecer en el mural de Los Medios de Transporte, dando cuenta de esta manera de lo representativo de este animal en el país), el rinoceronte asiático (el único que menciona en el texto), la cobra, y el jabalí (probablemente un Sus scrofa cristatus). Resulta llamativa la ausencia de la vaca, quizás una forma discreta de eludir – tanto en este como en el mural de La economía – una de las cuestiones más controvertidas sobre la situación económica de la India, de especial relevancia en Occidente tras la controvertida publicación de Katherine Mayo (1927).27 27 El libro Mother India suscitó una gran polémica en los Estados Unidos. Los lectores de Vanity Fair y el propio Covarrubias estaban familiarizados con el contenido del mismo y con la figura de Mayo, a la que el mexicano dedicó la caricatura “auntie Mayo” (Vanity Fair, 1928a: 67). Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.93-113, ISSN 2339-8523 107 LA INDIA PARA LAS MASAS ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Figura IV. Detalle de “La fauna y la flora”. Colección de David Rumsey. 5. La economía La economía es el más complejo de estos murales y quizás de toda la obra de Covarrubias. En él se perciben dos descripciones: de una parte, se clasifica el color del suelo según su uso primario, y de otra, se representan los productos más característicos de cada región (Covarrubias, 1940). Así, presta atención a la alimentación, diciéndonos que “los habitantes del sur de (…) la India se han alimentado de arroz desde tiempos inmemoriales” mientras que “los del norte de (…) la India consumen trigo y mijo” (Covarrubias, 1940). Figura V. Detalle de “La economía”. Colección de David Rumsey. 108 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.93-113, ISSN 2339-8523 MARISA PEIRÓ MÁRQUEZ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Así, sobre el color verde oscuro, que utiliza para pueblos que practican la agricultura de manera intensiva como medio de subsistencia, aunque con procedimientos de cultivo tradicionales, representa a “los pueblos cuya economía se basa en el cultivo del arroz, como (…) los indios de la costa” (Covarrubias, 1940). En color verde oliva señala “países donde prevalece el sistema de las “plantaciones”, colocando como ejemplo “algunas regiones de la India” (Covarrubias, 1940). Aunque no las nombra directamente, incluye también, en color rojo, áreas altamente industrializadas próximas a grandes ciudades; estas se corresponden con Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Chennai, y zonas cercanas al Ganges y al Golfo de Bengala. Por último, en color gris, dedicado a “pueblos que practican el pastoreo nómada por subsistencia” (Covarrubias, 1940) coloca a los baluk de Baluchistán, mientras que la pesca a gran escala de la bahía de Bengala se representó mediante el color azul oscuro (Covarrubias, 1940). A pesar de señalar zonas con una fuerte industria, no incluye como representaciones objetuales ningún producto industrial, sino que se decide por productos procedentes de la agricultura (algodón, té, cacao, trigo y mijo) y ganadería (en Baluchistán representa la cabeza de una res, única alusión mínima a la ya mencionada cuestión de la vaca), la pesca (mediante un gran atún) u otras explotaciones de los recursos naturales, como el cáñamo, el caucho, las perlas (al sur de la India) o los zafiros (en Sri Lanka). 6. Los medios de transporte En el mural Los medios de transporte se representan tanto los transportes tradicionales como algunas de las más modernas innovaciones, pues junto a todo tipo de embarcaciones y vehículos de tracción animal y humana Covarrubias sitúa al China Clipper,28 uno de los primeros aviones comerciales modernos. De hecho, es con su descripción con la que concluye su descriptivo y singular texto: “La mayor contribución a la transportación de nuestros tiempos ha sido el gigantesco China Clipper, el cual representa la cumbre de una época en la navegación y un símbolo de las ambiciones y sueños que engloba el área del Pacífico: traer Asia a América y América a Asia en cinco días.” (Covarrubias, 1940). 28 El China Clipper fue el primer avión comercial que permitió el correo y el comercio aéreo entre Norteamérica y Asia en octubre de 1936. Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.93-113, ISSN 2339-8523 109 LA INDIA PARA LAS MASAS ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Figura VI. Detalle de “Los medios de transporte”. Colección de David Rumsey. En lo tocante a la India, son cuatro los transportes que reciben representación gráfica: se trata de dos transportes terrestres y de dos acuáticos. Así, en el norte de la India, Covarrubias representa al elefante – quizás uno de los más importantes por su carácter de icono nacional, del que nos dice que hace todo tipo de trabajos pesados (Covarrubias, 1940); en el centro del país sitúa una carreta de tracción animal tirada por dos cebúes, que menciona (Covarrubias, 1940).29 En cuanto a las embarcaciones, incluye dos tipos de barcos de vela: una casa-barco típica en el Golfo de Bengala, y al sur, una oruva, que define como “lanchas singalesas de los pescadores de perlas” (Covarrubias, 1940). Conclusiones Tras este análisis, no podemos evitar establecer algunas comparaciones en aras de resaltar la singularidad de las representaciones de Covarrubias. Si tenemos en cuenta las informaciones proyectadas por otros mapas pictóricos del momento, especialmente los cada vez más habituales realizados para diferentes funciones relacionadas con la creciente industria turística30, veremos cómo si bien Covarrubias recurre a algunos 29 Este tipo de carretas era en realidad habitual en todo el país, y aparece habitualmente representado en ilustraciones y fotografías de la zona de Kerala. 30 Como ejemplos, véanse los numerosos diseños realizados por Lucien Boucher para Air France o por L. Helguera para PanAm. Por norma general, los mapas de esta época incluyen referencias a edificios religiosos y palaciegos, a animales como el tigre, el elefante o monos, y junto a los ya mencionados sikhs 110 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.93-113, ISSN 2339-8523 MARISA PEIRÓ MÁRQUEZ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------elementos tópicos y habituales en el imaginario popular sobre la India – el elefante, el sikh, el tamil, la gurkha, la oruva, el carro de cebúes, al mismo tiempo no solo evita algunos estereotipos generales (el tigre, el curry, las especias, edificios importantes de Mumbai o Calcuta31), sino que introduce algunas representaciones muy poco habituales, ya sea por su carácter coyuntural (el bengalí independentista) como por su exactitud científica y etnográfica (la vivienda nativa, las obras de arte rajputas y cingalesas…). Con ello, realiza un acertado, aunque sobremanera limitado, análisis y explicación de algunos de los rasgos distintivos de la cultura India proyectados hacia el exterior. Estos mismos, por la particular relación emisor-receptor en la que se concibieron y disfrutaron estos murales y sus exitosas reproducciones,32 constituyeron todo un hito en la cultura middlebrow norteamericana y en la concepción que la misma tuvo sobre ese cada vez menos desconocido subcontinente Indio. OBRAS CITADAS “A Step-son of Mother India’s Aunt Answers”, Vanity Fair, agosto de 1928 : 67, 85, 93-94-96. ANAYA DÁVILA, GRACIELA, & DE MARÍA Y CAMPOS, ALFONSO (2006). Covarrubias: esplendor del Pacífico. México: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes. AZUELA DE LA CUEVA, ALICIA (2007). “Peace by Revolution: una aproximación léxico- visual al México revolucionario.”, Historia Mexicana : 1263-1307. CHADOURNE, MARC (1930). CHAUDHARY, ZAHID R. Chine. París: Editions Plon. (2012). Afterimage of empire: photography in nineteenth-century India. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. CONTRERAS, CARLOS & DAHLHAUS, DOLORES (2007). Miguel Covarrubias en México y San Francisco. México: Instituto Nacional de Arqueología e Historia y Museo Nacional de Antropología. y tamiles, aparecen encantadores de serpientes, faquires y conductores de elefantes. Sin embargo, no debemos olvidar que en tanto que elementos de promoción turística, estos tienen un mayor factor de persuasión que los realizados por Covarrubias, de un mayor carácter didáctico y conciliador. 31 El Taj Majal, uno de los elementos más potentes y habituales utilizados en las representaciones simbólicas y didácticas sobre la India, no predominaría sobre la imaginería colonial hasta la década de los 50. 32 Recordemos que más de diecisiete millones de personas visitaron el recinto de la exposición, y que la edición en papel alcanzó una gran fama y es todavía hoy muy admirada y coleccionada. Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.93-113, ISSN 2339-8523 111 LA INDIA PARA LAS MASAS ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------COVARRUBIAS, MIGUEL (1940). GARCÍA-NORIEGA & NIETO, L. Pageant of the Pacific. San Francisco: Pacific House. (coord) (1987). Miguel Covarrubias: homenaje. México: Centro Cultural/Arte Contemporáneo. GONSALVES, PETER (2010). Clothing for Liberation: A Communication Analysis of Gandhi's Swadeshi Revolution. Los Angeles: SAGE. “How the Lion Flag Evolved”, Sunday Observer, 30 de octubre de 2005. Disponible online en: http://www.sundayobserver.lk/2005/10/30/juniorob07.html “Imaginary Interviews nº 1”, Vanity Fair, diciembre de 1930: 56. India (1876). Nueva York: Mead Dodd. MAYO, KATHERINE MEDINA, ANDRÉS (1927). Mother India. Nueva York: Harcourt, Brace & Co. (1976). “Miguel Covarrubias y el romanticismo en la antropología”. (ueva Antropología, vol. I, Nº4: 11-42. NAVARRETE, SYLVIA (1993), Miguel Covarrubias - artista y explorador. México: Ediciones Era. PEIRÓ MÁRQUEZ, MARISA (2013). Miguel Covarrubias (1904-1957) y China: relaciones artísticas y culturales. Trabajo Fin de Máster, Universidad de Zaragoza. “Personages of Paris. A Few of the Fancy Foreigners Who Scintillate in the “Ville Lumière” Vanity Fair, noviembre de 1927: 36. “Roads to Redemption. A Few Well-Known Reformers and their Contrasting Methods.”, Vanity Fair, octubre de 1928: 60. SELIGMANN, C. G. & SELIGMANN, BRENDA Z (1911). The Veddas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. SCOTT, ALLAN N. & WELD, CHARLES RICHARD (1862). Sketches in India; taken at Hyderabad and Secunderabad, in the Madras Presidency. Londres: Lovell Reeve. UPHAM, EDWARD (1833). The Mahávansi, the Rájá-Ratnácari, and the Rájá-Vali, forming the Sacred and historical books of Ceylon. Londres: Parbury, Allen & Co. vol. III. WATSON, J. FORBES, KAYE, JOHN WILLIAM & TAYLOR, MEADOWS (1868-1875). The people of India: a series of photographic illustrations, with descriptive letterpress, of the races and tribes of Hindustan: originally prepared under the authority of the Government of India, and reproduced by order of the secretary of state for India in council. Londres: India Museum. 7 volúmenes. WILLIAMS, ADRIANA (1994). 112 Covarrubias. Austin: University of Texas Press. Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.93-113, ISSN 2339-8523 MARISA PEIRÓ MÁRQUEZ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------WILLIAMS, ADRIANA & CHONG, Y (2005). Covarrubias in Bali. Singapur: Editions Didier Millet. DE ZOETE, BERYL (1954), “An Episode in Kandyan dance-noblesse oblige”, Asiatische Studien : Zeitschrift der Schweizerischen Asiengesellschaft = Études asiatiques: revue de la Société Suisse-Asie, nº 8: 178- 183. Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.93-113, ISSN 2339-8523 113 Indi@logs Vol 2 2015, pp. 114-118, ISSN: 2339-8523 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------FROM JOHAE TO JAAKI: BRIGIG VIKIGS TO VARAASI NILAMBRI GHAI Independent Scholar [email protected] Received: 26-11-2014 Accepted: 30-11-2014 This book is about Johanne Nielsen, who was born on November 27, 1873, and who spent her childhood and youth in her father’s house in Fiolstraede, a district located in the inner part of old Copenhagen. It was not common then for parents to educate their daughters and she was one of the first young women to have completed the studentereksamen and the first year of a university program known as Filosofikum that entitled her to sign herself as a “Candidate in the Subject of Philosophy”. Her parents were proud of her achievement, and were ready to send her for higher education. This all came to an abrupt end when, at the age of 21, Johanne met Bulaki Rama Chopra, a young barrister from India at a conference in Stockholm, and fell deeply in love with him. It is not clear why she was attracted to him. He was shorter than she was, and did not have the stereotypical physical attributes that women look for in men. He might have been the very first man from India that Johanne had ever met. Perhaps it was his brilliance and creativity that attracted her to him. He was a sculptor, a Sanskrit scholar, an innovative thinker, and a writer. Regardless of the socio-cultural and linguistic differences that separated them, she felt deeply committed in her love, and informed her parents of her wish to marry him. The story goes that Johanne’s parents tried to keep her away from Bulaki Rama by sending her to a convent from where she was forbidden to leave. Bulaki Rama and his friends quietly sent her a message to jump over the wall of the convent while they waited below with bed sheets to catch her when she jumped. Later, after reassuring letters from Bulaki Rama, Johanne’s parents reluctantly NILAMBRI GHAI ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------agreed to the alliance. However, they would not allow the wedding to take place in Copenhagen, perhaps to avoid the scandal that such a wedding would have had on their business and social status. Johanne and Bulaki Rama were thus married very simply in a Sikh Gurudwara in London (UK) even though neither one of them was Sikh. It happened to be the most convenient form of a wedding ceremony since it did not require religious conversions. Following their wedding in 1895, the couple left for India. It could not have been easy for young Johanne, whose name was changed to “Janaki.” She was in a country bitterly engaged in moving toward independence from British rule. Many of the people she knew and admired were repelled by the presence of foreign, white Sahibs who controlled the lives and careers of the darker “natives”. Johanne was probably viewed as a “pharangi” (foreigner) and a “gori” (fair complexioned woman) who had ensnared Bulaki Rama by her commandeering, Nordic appearance that awarded her a seemingly huge advantage over her husband. Johanne’s journey of love from Copenhagen to Hafizabad, Dehra Dun and Benaras (Varanasi) also led her into a new world of Theosophy, traditional Hindu caste differences, and Indian nationalism. Her letters describe close connections with some of the best known thinkers and writers from Punjab - Bhai Veer Singh, Professor Puran Singh, and Dr. Khudadad - who met regularly to read from their works, and who planned their struggle to shape a future vision of the country. Due to the influence of her friends, Bhai Veer Singh and Professor Puran Singh, Johanne was greatly drawn toward the teachings of Sikhism. Although a combination of multiple beliefs shaped her mind, she found that Christianity, Hinduism and Sikhism could easily co-exist within the parameters of the principles of Theosophy, a way of thinking that was passed on to her by her friend and mentor, Annie Besant. The book is based on letters from Johanne and her family and from interviews with people in Denmark and India. It describes the impact of World War I and the struggle of people waiting to gain independence from colonial rule. It is about a European woman adapting to a new culture, embracing it, and yet maintaining her heritage and the love for the two countries she called home: Denmark and India. It is about how she finally left Bulaki Rama, and found employment through the help of her friend Annie Besant, at the Theosophical Society in Benaras (Varanasi). Living alone with her four children, away from the man for whom she had left her land of origin, was an 115 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.114-118, ISSN 2339-8523 FROM JOHANNE TO JANAKI ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------incredibly courageous decision made by Johanne. The book is a tribute to this courage, and is an attempt to revisit the Danish identity lost by Johanne’s children growing up in India. The book is also a search for connections between the life of the author, Nilambri Ghai, who like her grandmother Johanne, moved from the East to the West – from India to Canada, and who also felt the loss of her home culture and language. The book draws parallels and seeks to reclaim lost identities and lost memories. Dera Ismail Khan: 30 December, 1897: “Dear Father and Mother: We wish you all a happy Christmas and ew Year. Wish it may become a really pleasant year for you, for all your own and for us here. It is fixed that we shall now see each other this summer. Everyone will be in good health. Little Sakuntala sends ew Year greetings and kiss to all of you and to cousin, eil. ----Johanne During her second visit to Denmark, in November 1902, an article on Johanne was published in Damernes Blad commenting on the unusual story of a young Danish woman who had given up her family and culture to follow the man she loved to India. Johanne and Bulaki Rama’s daughter, Sakuntala, was six years old. It was not uncommon for girls to be married at that young age, and this explains the seemingly strange fact described in the article that Sakuntala had already started to receive proposals. When a young girl was married, she stayed with her parents until puberty, after which time, she moved permanently to her husband’s home. Sakuntala would have received 116 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.114-118, ISSN 2339-8523 NILAMBRI GHAI ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------proposals only from the warrior or the Kshatriya caste, second after the Brahmins. The caste system in Indian society was fairly rigid, and led to various forms of discrimination. As mentioned in the article, Johanne was considered “impure” since she had eaten beef in Denmark. Many of the women would not eat with her. Some would “not even touch her.” Translation of the article from Damernes Blad: “Eight years ago, she followed the man whom her heart had chosen – a man who belonged to another race, and whose country was thousands of miles from her own country. The man was a Hindu advocate, and the country was India. As it may be of interest to our readers to hear about the home and way of living of this woman in the far east, we visited the lady, who is for the moment on visit here, and we met her in her childhood home, in a cosy oldfashioned flat in Fiolstraede. The fact that Mrs. Chopra has so well integrated in India is probably due to her will and ability to assimilate with the Hindus in as many ways as possible. She quickly learned the language, became a vegetarian, wore all Indian women’s clothing, following all daily life’s details, especially by converting to Hindu beliefs. Therefore she is also on very good terms with all her husband’s friends. Their wives, the Hindu women, play such secondary roles that their behaviour is of no importance. As a curiosity, we ought to mention that since Mrs. Chopra before her marriage had eaten beef (in India the cow is worshipped through the God Krishna who as a child lived for a long time with cowherds), the women consider her impure, and none will eat together with her, yes, some not even touch her. The lady’s husband, whose acquaintance she made during a trip to Sweden, is, besides being an advocate, a doctor in Sanskrit. After his father’s death, he has taken over the running of all his important land properties. Their dwelling, 117 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.114-118, ISSN 2339-8523 FROM JOHANNE TO JANAKI ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------from which we bring a picture above, is in Punjab, the five- river country near Lahore. The villa has a certain European style, as well as some furniture. During summertime when the heat is the strongest, they go to the Himalayan Mountains. An adorable little girl with the beautiful name of Sakuntala (songbird) travels together with her mother, and seems to be happy among her small Danish cousins. With her dark, soft eyes, her fine graceful body, her multi-coloured gold-sewn clothing, she does seem like a little tropical bird; a bird that can sing in Hindi, English and Danish. Even though she is very young, she has already had three proposals of marriage, all belonging to the same caste as their father, namely the warrior caste. But they have all, to their parents’ grief, received a refusal. This shows that the Hindus are in no way unfriendly towards European culture. Sakuntala, through her upbringing and birth, has taken a special stand among Hindu women who normally can neither read nor write. Immediately after Christmas, Mrs. Chopra will return to her country, followed by her family and friends. Best wishes for her future happiness. Happiness ought to follow this woman who, in order to follow her husband, sacrificed all that is of value for an European woman: country, parents, beliefs, all the environment an educated woman grew up in and to which she was attached with deep roots.” “Fru J.B. Fajzada Chopra.” (Sunday, November 30, 1902) Damernes Blad. no. 48, 5th Edition. pp 572-573. Note: Credits for photographs, translations and background information: Knud and Jeannette Greiersen 118 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.114-118, ISSN 2339-8523 Indi@logs Vol 2 2015, pp. 119-123, ISSN: 2339-8523 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------SALMA RUSHDIE’S MIDIGHT’S CHILDRE, THE PLAY AS TEXT AD PERFORMACE: A ITRODUCTORY OTE D.C.R.A. GOONETILLEKE Emeritus Professor University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka [email protected] Received: 26-08-2014 Accepted: 24-10-2014 Salman Rushdie himself wrote a screenplay for a proposed BBC adaptation of Midnight’s Children. The project collapsed twice because first the Indian Government and then the Sri Lankan authorities gave in to Muslim objections and refused the BBC permission to locate the mini-series in these countries. Rushdie’s five-episode, 290-minute television dramatization was published in 1999 – after its BBC production was finally abandoned.1 But the Royal Shakespeare Company was keen on a dramatization for the theatre by Rushdie with Tim Supple, with whom he had collaborated on the acclaimed stage version of Haroun and the Sea of Stories at the Royal National Theatre in 1999. The RSC originally requested a version of Alice in Wonderland, but Rushdie felt that there was no special reason why he should be the one doing that and showed the RSC the screenplay of Midnight’s Children. This led to the adaptation for the theatre of Midnight’s Children (2002) with Rushdie as author and co-adaptor, Simon Reade as co-adaptor and dramaturg, Tim Supple as co-adaptor and director. Supple said: “We are not setting up to try to replicate the book on the stage, we will try to create something that is like a sibling to the book, and just as multi-layered” (Gibbons: 11). Rushdie’s own stage experience, minimal though it was, probably was a useful guide. He was involved in student productions, acted briefly in the fringe theatre circuit after graduation, occupying a marginal position, and has confessed recently: “I always loved the theatre” (“Interview”, 2003: 12). His early professional experience in 1 A new government gave permission for the film version to be shot in Sri Lanka, directed by Deepa Mehta. It was released in 2013. SALMAN RUSHDIE’S MIDIGHT’S CHILDRE -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------advertising may have come in handy. Advertising is a merciless discipline: it teaches the writer what is essential and how to manipulate his audience. A man who has written advertisements will know where the punch must occur. It is amazing that so much of the verve and width of suggestion in the novel (panoramic, non-linear, tragic-comic, encompassing history, religion and politics) and its ability to activate the reader’s mind remains in the compressed and sharply edited version of the play, quarter of a million words contracted into three hours of theatre. Ultimately, this is only possible because Rushdie, who conceived the whole, is certain where the stress should fall in every phase of the novel and can cut with a sure and skilful hand. The galloping of Shivaji’s statue, effective in the novel as suggesting Hindu militancy, is missing but the dialogue of the drama brings out the fissures sufficiently; predictably snakes, Dr. Schaepsteker’s Institute and the Tubriwallah are deleted. The play makes racy reading and retains the best in the judgment of those familiar with the text, yet may have fared poorly in performance. The phantasmagoria in the Sundarbans with the temptresses, the charred skeletons, comes out forcefully, the journey through the jungle being inspired by Apocalypse ow almost intertextually (the Americans at war in Vietnam, the Pakistanis in Bangladesh). When the Emergency is taking place, Shiva (the name indicates his propensities since Shiva is the Destroyer in the Hindu Triad) wants to smash the Midnight’s Children Conference and takes Saleem into an interrogation room. The disclosure of their identities is dramatically very effective: Saleem: He’s really me. I’m really him. Fat Man: He doesn’t know what he’s saying. Saleem: Born together. Same place, same time. Then … a mistake. Shiva is now interested – his face close to Saleem’s. Shiva: What’s this nonsense? What mistake? Saleem: The babies. You’re really me. I’m really you. Thin Man: Are you following this, Major? Fat Man: It’s some sort of fixation. 2 Shiva (enraged as it dawns on him): Bastard. Haramzada. 2 Adapted for the theatre by Rushdie et al., pp.111-12. All subsequent references to the adaptation are from this edition and the page numbers are incorporated in the text. 120 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.119-123, ISSN 2339-8523 D.C.R.A. GOONETILLEKE -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The play departs from the novel at certain points. Since drama is required, more prominence is given to the Lila Sabarmati and Homi Catrack illegitimate affair; Lila has lines to speak and is not just a figure in the narrative. The Sabarmati killing, Amina’s reaction and Hanif’s death, are all splendidly theatrical; what is merely recorded in the novel gets forcefully foregrounded. In the novel the significance of the birth of Saleem and Shiva is discovered gradually, but in the play it is focused on at the beginning. The birth scene is repeated (40) and thus highlighted as a focal point. The switching of the tags of the babies is surreptitious and reported in the novel, but in the play it is foregrounded by being performed and witnessed by the multitudinous eyes of the audience. “The nice white bed” (1) on which Amina Sinai lies, and “the plain metal bed” (1) of Vanita offer a contrast and underline the class issue. Joe D’Costa’s name suggests a Eurasian of Portuguese/Goan extraction, marginalized and powerless, unlike the Imperial English or the natives rooted in the soil for centuries. He is an orderly while Mary, his girl friend, is a nurse - at Doctor Narlikar’s Nursing Home where the babies are born. Joe says: We have to do it now, Mary. The real revolution. The rich must fall; then we’ll have our freedom. (42) Mary switches the tags of the babies and exposes her motivation: I’m doing this for you, Joseph. Let the poor be rich, and the rich poor. (42) There is more emphasis on the class struggle in the play (and in the 1999 The Screenplay of Midnight’s Children) than in the novel. Robert Brustein argues: “Saleem and Shiva, the switched infants, are forced to represent the artificial division between the entire Muslim and Hindu nations” (Brustein). I think (like Joe D’Costa) they represent the division between the Haves and Have-nots. (The racial affiliations of Saleem and Shiva are complex.) The young Saleem expresses the ideals and aspirations for Midnight’s Children: What’s all this? High-caste, low-caste – Hindu-Muslim – rich-poor – that’s not for us! We can find a … a new way. (79) There is in the play a projection of a visual representation of India – with its contrasts and cleavages. The audience has time to focus on the screen; the more perceptive will see the Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.119-123, ISSN 2339-8523 121 SALMAN RUSHDIE’S MIDIGHT’S CHILDRE -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------significance (the less at least the multitudinous confusion), the difficulty of taking in India and seeing it whole – what Mrs Moore in A Passage to India faces from different scenes and their intimations as she leaves India is what Rushdie also conveys through the partial glimpses afforded by the perforated sheet in the novel and in the play. The play is spare and also stylized: there is hardly any scenery; the props are minimal; banners of fabric form a backdrop; a ladder suggests stairs; a few actors in uniform represent an army; characters come on and off the stage without plot motivation. The stage is dominated by a giant diagonally bisected movie screen. Throughout the play we see historical film, like that of Nehru announcing India’s Independence, as well as film of the characters shot specifically for the play. The concurrent use of stage action and multimedia devices re-enacts the newness, the different levels and mixed genres of Rushdie’s technique in the novel. The play is a work of art in its own right as well. It has zing and zest, yet it is not fully successful as theatre. Conflict and tension are the essence of drama. The play has plenty of conflict, but it is diffuse; it lacks a sense of intense, focal conflict. It is episodic – deliberately so. Rushdie has explained that the style the collaborators went was for “a cinematic effect, with a large number of very short scenes.” (James). But the fact is the play is not sufficiently cohesive, being too diffuse and centrifugal. Saleem Sinai, the protagonist, does not hang together as a cohesive human character both in the novel and in the play, though by representing India he does exhibit the plight of the sub-continent in a human way. Shiva is stick figure. Padma is important as Saleem’s Muse and the reader’s/theatregoer’s surrogate. She emerges vividly both in the novel and in the play as a full-bodied character, but she is the only such figure in the play. The Royal Shakespeare Company brought its London production to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and, sponsored by Columbia University, to the Apollo Theatre in Harlem in March 2003. Together, the two universities paid more than $2 million to the RSC to help commission the play. It is important to observe that the production was funded by universities, not publishers or theatre magnates. Indeed, Columbia University held a month-long “Midnight’s Children” Humanities Festival around the same time. Both universities offered a large number of conversations, roundtables, panels, rehearsals 122 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.119-123, ISSN 2339-8523 D.C.R.A. GOONETILLEKE -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------and readings related to the play, all open to the public. The play was performed six times at Michigan and twelve times in New York. All these facts testify to the magnitude of the book, the author, and also to academic dictates. However, the performance of the play in London and the US was considered a flop by critics, though the RSC claimed to be happy that the London version played to 75 percent capacity and, according to Rushdie, “audiences responded enthusiastically to the play” (James). The play has its intrinsic flaws, but the performance itself had its shortcomings. Robert Brustein, for instance, picks out weaknesses in the acting (the cast was mostly Anglo-Asian and Asian, a significant first for the usually Caucasian RSC, but they were not among the better players in the London theatre) and the mostly damp theatrical squibs, signified by over-amplified explosions, laser beams, shadowgraphs, and tricky lighting effects (among them Richard Foreman’s familiar habit of focusing blinding lights in the audience’s eyes) (Brustein). Yet there is hope for a more successful exploitation of the play’s potential, learning from the first essay by the RSC. WORKS CITED BRUSTEIN, ROBERT (2003). ‘Why Plays Fail’, The ew Republic, 14 April. GIBBONS, FIACHRA (2002). “RSC to put Rushdie’s jinxed saga on stage”, The Guardian, 22 October. “INTERVIEW WITH SALMAN RUSHDIE”, (2003). Time Magazine, reprinted in The Sunday Leader, 26 January. JAMES, CARYN (2003). “Critic’s Notebook; After the Fatwa, Playwriting and Partygoing”, The ew York Times, 9 March. RUSHDIE, SALMAN, SIMON READE AND TIM SUPPLE (2003). Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, New York: Modern Library. Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.119-123, ISSN 2339-8523 123 Indi@logs Nº 2 2015, pp. 124-132, ISSN: 2339-8523 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------FROM MAIGAIA TO MALGUDI REVIEW OF MOHA G. RAMAA, RK ARAYA - A ITRODUCTIO SATENDRA NANDAN Emeritus Professor, Donald Horne Institute, University of Canberra [email protected] Received: 16-01-2015 Accepted: 18-02-2015 ‘India will go on’. This is what the Indian novelist RK Narayan said to me in London in 1961, before I had ever been to India. V.S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization (1977: 2) That Naipaulian epigraph contains so much. Just like the first sentence of his classic novel, A House for Mr Biswas: Ten weeks before he died, Mr Mohun Biswas, a journalist of Sikkim Street, St James, Port of Spain, was sacked. This is a sentence of history. In any index of authors you’ll find Naipaul is closely followed by Narayan. In between, occasionally my name also appears, a small writer from a very small village, Maigania, in Fiji. But the year 1961 has a special personal resonance for me. I’d just completed the BA English Hons degree from the University of Delhi: three delightful years, eight papers in English—from William Shakespeare to Lord Tennyson, three in History, one in Philosophy. But no Indian writer was ever mentioned by my Professors, especially those teaching English, at the college; once or twice Rabindranath Tagore’s name and reputation was dropped by a Bengali lecturer, Mr Mitra. It was ten years later at the University of Leeds, in 1971, that I first began reading a course in Indian Writing in English. Leeds led in several pioneering areas - it had the first Professor of American Literature in the UK; the first Professor in Commonwealth Literature in the world; it changed the direction of English teaching in many university departments all over the world. The course was taught by the redoubtable Professor CD Narasimhaiah. CDN, as we fondly called him, was moulded in the Great Tradition of F R Leavis. In his company some of us also met Dr Leavis, his teacher at Cambridge. CDN began SATENDRA NANDAN ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------with the epics and introduced us to Indian Writers in English. However, there were few takers for the course. Two of us - Mark Mcwatt from the Caribbean and Satendra Nandan from the Pacific - became CDN’s devoted students. It was in this course I discovered that in the early 1960s Nirad C Chaudhuri, not a writer CDN admired, had lived at Kashmiri Gate a few miles away from my college when I studied in Delhi. Kashmiri Gate was famous for a couple of restaurants and a tailoring shop owned by a Mr Khanna who knew, with uncanny precision, when a foreign student arrived in a local hostel: later I realized he could have been a character from the pages of a Narayan novel. But by then I’d returned to Fiji without any acquaintance with RK Narayan’s fiction. No-one, not even Mr Khanna, ever mentioned a writer living in that area, although I’d seen a copy of The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian in a local bookshop. It remained unsold and unread. Years later, Mr Chaudhuri visited the University of Leeds - I spent an afternoon listening to him but couldn’t tell him I had studied close to his home in Old Delhi. Mr Chaudhuri wouldn’t let anyone else talk, and he was quite petty, I felt, to Indian students studying English literature in England. At Delhi University the only living writers who visited our college were Dom Moraes and Ved Mehta from Oxford, on a visit to India under the auspices of the British Council. We hadn’t read anything by them either. Decades later, I read two remarkable pieces of autobiographical writings by Dom Moraes and his collections of poems and travelogues. Ved Mehta’s books on India I enjoyed immensely: the portrait of his family members; and Portrait of India. Ved Mehta’s delightful essay on meeting RK Narayan in New York remains in my mind. The article was written for the "ew Yorker and published in his selections, John Is Easy to Please: Encounters with the Written and the Spoken Word (1971). Reading it one didn’t realize Ved Mehta had lost his sight in his childhood. The portrait of Narayan is titled “The Train Had Just Arrived at Malgudi Station”. It is a subtle introduction of a writer’s personality, mind and art, in which the "ew Yorker often excels. Narayan’s train has not stopped moving since and in Malgudi he created a world very much his own. It’s full of characters in a small town with large ambitions. However, it’s not a microcosm of India: one aspect of India, yes; but “the vast, metamorphic, continent-sized culture that feels, to Indians and visitors alike, like a non-stop 125 Indi@logs, Nº 2 2015, pp.124-132, ISSN 2339-8523 FROM MAIGANIA TO MALGUDI ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------assault on the senses, the emotions, the imagination and the spirit” remains elusive. No single writer can do that. RK Narayan’s world of Malgudi, though, is more real in literature than many a small town that litter the landscape of this loved and lived land, often the birthplace of bitter harvest of communal hatred; and at times showing a light to the world. The story of India is particularly meaningful in 2014 as we commemorate the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War. Europe had become the very heart of darkness as India was seeking freedom from the imprisoning British imperial chain. In a sense this is the extraordinary achievement of Indian writers using the English language as a weapon of deepest creative endeavours, especially the generation from Nehru to Narayan. Parliamentary democracy and the English language remain two of the most enduring gifts of England to a brutally divided British India. The teaching and writing of literature, too, is part of that that unique encounter between two civilizations. * The story of Narayan’s evolution as an imaginative writer in English is the most fascinating of all. So much of his writing is autobiographical like Vidia Naipaul’s. Naipaul writes about Narayan, a favourite of his father’s Seepersad Naipaul who is Vidia’s one unforgettable inspiration: The novel, which is a form of social inquiry, and as such outside Indian tradition, had come to India with the British. By the late nineteenth century it had become established in Bengal, and had then spread. But it was only towards the end of the British period, in the 1930s, that serious novelists appeared who wrote in English, for first publication in London. Narayan was one of the earliest and best of these. He had never been a ‘political’ writer, not even in the explosive 1930s; and he was unlike many of the writers after independence who seemed to regard the novel, and all writing, as an opportunity for autobiography and boasting (Naipaul, 1977:18-19) Naipaul’s India: A Wounded Civilization was published in 1977. His An Area of Darkness: An Experience of India, was published in 1964. Both books are important for a reader to understand Indian Writing in English mainly because they’re written by an outsider-insider whose grandparents had been taken to Trinidad as indentured labourers in the 1840s. They carried India in their gathries, hold-alls. Even Gandhi spent his most formative years in England and South Africa and acquired a knowledge of British subjection of the subcontinent as only an outsider could. Both loved India - Naipaul as a writer, Gandhi as a political activist. Literature and 126 Indi@logs, Nº 2 2015, pp.124-132, ISSN 2339-8523 SATENDRA NANDAN ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------politics have a lot in common. Ultimately their concern is freedom of the imagination and what it means to be a human being, so messy and multitudinous, so noble in reason, and yet a mere quintessence of dust. India is full of deceptive angels and dusty devils. With his gentle genius, Narayan imagined this community. * The volume, R.K "arayan: An Introduction, by Mohan C Ramanan is a lucidly written critical introduction to the whole oeuvre of Narayan’s more than six decades of writing. Narayan wrote prolifically - over 30 works, from Swami and Friends (1935) to The Grandmother’s Tale (1994), seeped in the stories of the great epics and the life that grew in the heat and dust under his bare soles. The most creative ground is under one’s feet - and one’s destiny may be written on one’s dusty soles rather than on the stretched palms of one’s hand. RK Narayan was born in 1906 and lived almost until hundred. He died in 2001 - missing a century by a few runs as a cricket-obsessed Indian might say. Cricket, too, is a colonial gift in which the Indians have produced more individual geniuses than most others. Narayan’s writing contemporaries were Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao - they formed the trinity of Indian novelists in English. All three lived for almost a century; and yet in Delhi I’d neither heard nor read any of these marvellous story tellers. Today, of course, Indian Writing in English is an industry: from Amitav Ghosh to Vikram Seth, Anita Desai to Arundhati Roy - a rich harvest of Indian writers who have opened the Indian realities to the English-speaking world as only writers can do, “a body of literature unsurpassed in its sustained imagination”. Salman Rushdie, born in India, is an exceptional phenomenon - I wonder why he hasn’t yet been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. 2013 would have been a significant year as Tagore was awarded it in 1913. No writer from the subcontinent has been awarded that prize since. Not that the Nobel - despite its acknowledged prestige - is the ultimate recognition - Gandhi never got it for Peace; Kissinger did, and Jean Paul Sartre declined it. 127 Indi@logs, Nº 2 2015, pp.124-132, ISSN 2339-8523 FROM MAIGANIA TO MALGUDI ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Professor Ramanan’s book is a timely one and the publishers deserve our thanks: the blurb puts it thus: Contemporary Indian Writers in English (CIWE) is a series that presents critical commentaries of the best-known names in the genre….The CIWE texts cater to a wide audience - from the student seeking information and critical material on particular works to the general…Cast in a userfriendly format and written with a high degree of critical and theoretical rigour…CIWE, we hope, will further strengthen the interest and readership of one of the most significant components of world literatures in English. Mohan Ramanan’s introduction is “eminently readable”. Ramanan is both a creative writer and a critic of distinction. He’s a Professor in the Department of English at the University of Hyderabad in India. The volume has nine sections: Introduction; Essays; Memoirs and Travelogues; Short Fiction; Longer Fiction; Thematic Concerns; Caste Class and Gender; Form and Value; and finally, Conclusion. Interestingly there are “Topics for Discussion”: clearly the volume is aimed at students and teachers in the colleges and universities. A select bibliography is judiciously chosen. Each section critically introduces the many genres that make up Narayan’s stupendous output in English. Ramanan writes with clarity of style and a deep knowledge of the ethos and environment which produced both Narayan and his writings and he has read Narayan’s work with empathy and insight that are integral to Narayan’s own writing. The critic’s observations generally reveal the nature of Narayan’s many compositions, and not obfuscate his interpretation of life. Sensibly he avoids the pomposity of postcolonial theoretical prose, although several critics are mentioned throughout the book and their work for scholars to pursue further afield. The emphasis is very much on Narayan’s writing and its interest for the reader. Narayan “is a good combination of the Tamil-Hindu sensibility, married to a progressive Gandhian dream and a bridge between indigenous and European traditions. This was an enabling fusion” (Ramanan, 2013: 9). Ramanan’s critical interpretation is particularly salient when he shows the creative connection between the writer’s life and his writing. In Indian writing one cannot escape the overwhelming shadows of the two Indian epics. Indeed this is where the critical issues emerge for writings in English in India. When does one begin to decolonize the traditions which use a genre that is not indigenous? Narayan, of course, created a whole world in Malgudi, an integral part of the subcontinent, that is more real than a 128 Indi@logs, Nº 2 2015, pp.124-132, ISSN 2339-8523 SATENDRA NANDAN ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------million other villages and small towns, touched and explored by a non-indigenous language. And yet, it is a deeply limiting world, like great Gandhi’s vision of Ram Rajya for a modern India. When Rushdie and his close companion, Elizabeth West, edited the The Vintage Book of Indian Writing in English, 1947-1997, a paragraph in their introduction seemed to have upset many critics and readers in India: the prose writing - both fiction and non-fiction - created in this period by Indian writers working in English, is proving to be stronger and more important body of work than most of what has been produced in 16 ‘official languages’ of India, the so-called ‘vernacular languages’, during the same time; and, indeed, this new, and still burgeoning, ‘Indo-Anglian’ literature represents perhaps the most valuable contribution India has yet made to the world of books (1997: x) This is a bold claim but then Rushdie is a daring and dazzling author - Anton Joseph, A Memoir (2012) tells the story of his survival, courage, and creative strength. At the celebration of India’s fiftieth anniversary of independence another splendid volume was published: Sunil Khilnani’s The Idea of India (1997). Both these volumes in English captured the intellectual attention of readers who read mainly in English. Both give the reader an idea of India that has a lot to do with the one great encounter of the Indian sub-continent with the world’s supreme maritime colonial power. This ‘brief encounter’ changed India more dramatically than 5000 years of Indian history and mythology. I think this is important: the great Indian epics are situated in the sub-continent, including Sri Lanka. The modern Indian diaspora which began with European colonization of the past 500 years affected India most radically. While the British colonized the subcontinent most ruthlessly, as if the bee had found the very source of abundant nectar, it also cross-fertilized the flower to produce fruits of many kinds. The art of story-telling is an ancient Indian art - one can scarcely escape the vital influence of the two great epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Politicians and pundits are defined by these two encompassing epic narratives. Homer’s epics do not suffuse western civilization with the same depth or diversity and contemporary echoes. In Indian writing, hardly any writer is able to ignore the myth-making imagination of the Aryan mindset. One could say that the Aryan colonization was complete and the effects of the caste-system in the South more devastating and permanent. Its political implications are immense - even Gandhi couldn’t escape the impact. The more he talked of Ram Rajya, the more Pakistan became a possibility. And yet the great text of India is not the Ramayana or the Mahabharata: it’s really English colonization and that greatest 129 Indi@logs, Nº 2 2015, pp.124-132, ISSN 2339-8523 FROM MAIGANIA TO MALGUDI ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------of imperial crimes: the partition of India in 1947. The more you read about it the more history hurts in the guts of Mother India. No epic work of fiction has, so far, come out of that unwritten, unimagined tragedy. As if of what we cannot speak, we must forever remain silent. Even Midnight’s Children (1981) doesn’t quite confront that overwhelming reality. I went to India to study during my teens, a dozen years after that cataclysmic event in 1947. Now looking back after more than 50 years, I’m amazed that no-one talked about it in the class of 61-62 in the national capital’s university. It was, as if, a deliberate veil of historical amnesia had been dropped as a curtain of silence. Human beings cannot bear too much reality. And T S Eliot was a popular poet at my college every magazine, published at exam time in April, began with ‘April is the cruellest month….’ The waste land was in Europe, not in India. And yet millions of lives were displaced, killed. The brutality that the British practised and perpetrated on the sub-continent was lost in the lessons of English Literature. No-one made the connections between the triumphal tragedy of the European conquest of more than the sub-continent. And few escaped its lasting impact. That a Mahabharata had taken place on real Indian soil was hardly recognized in the Indian imagination wrapped up in myths and legends. RK Narayan’s writings do not delve in these profoundly political-human questions. The reader doesn’t get any idea of the dereliction and distress that was India. After all, Ram Rajya is a kind of royal tyranny, no matter how noble the king’s ideals expressed by a bandit poet. A classmate of mine in Delhi, Ramesh Rao, saw Rama’s exile not as a filial obligation sacrificing his throne, but Sita’s escape from no fewer than three mothers-in-law. Indian movies, which I saw in Fiji, were full of the mistreatment of daughters-in-law by terrible mothers-in-law. And my class mate Ramesh Rao, the brightest student in my class, had little sympathy for King Dashrath who dies grieving for Rama’s exile from the kingdom for fourteen years: what do you expect when you have three wives at the same time? Even Henry VIII was more careful, if ruthless, according to Rao, whose father was a Professor of Psychology at the university. Professor Ramanan comments: There is in Narayan’s essays the thoughtfulness of the citizen, the satirical eye of a compassionate observer of the world, the humorous flights of imagination and above all the shrewd appraisal of men and matters. In his novels Narayan creates a recognisable Indian community, peopled by 130 Indi@logs, Nº 2 2015, pp.124-132, ISSN 2339-8523 SATENDRA NANDAN ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------various human types - astrologers, clerks, criminals, charlatans, spiritual guides, painters, dancers, hoteliers, pretenders, mystic masseurs, members of joint family, caste characters and mahatmas, among others (Ramanan, 2013: 67) This of course is the Dickensian achievement, but unlike Charles Dickens who was really a reformer of the ills of his society, Narayan accepts the quietism inherent in Indian culture: all is acceptance - even this shall pass away. It’s really not the Gandhian non-violence which was an active and demanding philosophy of courage and change and immense compassion and legislative creativity. It was a revolutionary idea for India when used politically and socially. No wonder then the mahatma was assassinated by a high-caste Brahmin, a crime for which there’s no parallel in history or myth. The three bullets were real killers. Narayan’s world is both limiting and limited. Admittedly, no writer can capture a country or society in its entirety. What one needed was Ulysses from an Indian writer or a book like The Satanic Verses from one of a Hindu sensibility: if in English in the first half of the last century James Joyce’s Ulysses is the great novel; in the second half it’s really Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. An Indian writer, one day, may deconstruct and dismantle the protean hold the Indian epics have had on the Indian psyche for millennia. The newly elected government’s agenda of Hindutva as a definition of Bharat Mata seems to lead the nation towards another inner partition, far more terrible, I think, than that unnecessary vivisection in 1947. This time the Indians won’t have others to blame. Democracy and the idea of a secular nation are two of the most powerful modern political ideas to penetrate the Indian subcontinent. Both, I think, are gifts of the ‘other’ world. Indian democracy, the largest but not the oldest, is one great hope of the world. Its pluralistic, secular vision is important not only in India, with a population of 1.3 billion but also in places like Fiji, with scarcely a million inhabitants, made up of indigenous and immigrant people. If a multicultural polity of freedom fails in India, it could have devastating tsunami-like effects beyond the Indian Ocean. In this huge enterprise writers and artists are as important as politicians and business men and women. RK Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao gave us visions of at least three Indias. A chapter in this book on placing Narayan with his contemporaries would have added more substance to the critical work but perhaps that was beyond the scope of the volume. The volume is for the new reader who likes both clarity of thought and style. Ramanan excels in both. 131 Indi@logs, Nº 2 2015, pp.124-132, ISSN 2339-8523 FROM MAIGANIA TO MALGUDI ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Occasionally, though, even Ramanan lapses: Narayan modulates from chorology, that is, the science of space, to chronology, that is, the sense of time. In other words, we have the Bhaktinian chronotope and Foucaultian heterotopia, the time-space-matrix (Ramanan, 2013: 80) Sentences such as this detract from the critical insights that Ramanan gives with the intimate and intense authority of a reader who has read the Narayan oeuvre with deep interest and literary understanding. He is most satisfying to a reader-writer when he relates Narayan’s writings with his long journeys of personal life. It was a long, productive life for which a more comprehensive book is overdue. RK "arayan, An Introduction is a valuable work of literary interpretation. Professor Mohan Ramanan’s book may inspire others to attempt a definitive work on this remarkable man and novelist. My loss is that I never read him when I studied English Literature in India in the 1960s. Mohan C Ramanan’s Introduction will make me read the works of a fabulous writer of India, writing in English. WORKS CITED Naipaul, V S (1977). India. A Wounded Civilization, London: Andre Deutsch. Ramanan, Mohan G. (2013). RK "arayan - An Introduction, Contemporary Indian Writers in English, New Delhi: Foundation Books. Rushdie, Salman & Elizabeth West (eds) (1997). The Vintage Book of Indian Writing 1947-1997, London: Vintage. 132 Indi@logs, Nº 2 2015, pp.124-132, ISSN 2339-8523 Indi@logs Vol 2 2015, pp. 133-137, ISSN: 2339-8523 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------A TALK WITH SIDDHARTH DHAVAT SHAGHVI1 FELICITY HAND Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona [email protected] Received: 23-01-2015 Accepted: 24-02-2015 FH One of labels used a lot in academia is of course this very unsatisfactory thing called “postcolonial”. How do we talk about the kind of writing that is coming out of the former colonized nations. Do we actually have to give it some kind of name? Teaching in university one is obliged to label writers so can you suggest something more useful for us? SDS I hate the phrase “post-colonial”. One thing that is very interesting to me is to have an entire people defined by a kind of former government so to actually have that baggage label stuck onto them seventy years on after that culture and that society has long been dismissed is also a kind of colonialism. Another thing that comes to mind is that you would never find in other societies people being parcelled together by governments either past, present or future so writers that wrote during the Bush regime in America were never classified as “post democracy writers”. That brings me to another discussion of the phrase “magic realism”. Now what does magic realism mean to you? Why is it that writers out of India or Africa are always classified as “magic realists”? When you talk about Kafka or somebody turning into a cockroach, that’s not classified as magic realism. But if the same story is set in Asia or South America it is classified as magic realism. Writers coming out of Asia, Africa or South America are defined as magic realists, which takes away from the strength, the power of the realism and the imagination of the writing. So all these classifications that 1 The text is based on the talk given by the author at Casa Asia, Barcelona, 26th May 2014. The editor wishes to thank Ms. Núria Rota for her kindness in providing the audio of the interview. A TALK WITH SIDDHARTH DHANVANT SHANGHVI ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------come out of academic life to my mind both acknowledge in the same breath as much as they they dismiss. It is important that writers actually take ownership of how they define themselves. One phrase that stays with me is from Toni Morrison who wrote that definitions don’t lie in the hands of the defined, they lie in the hands of the definers. So it’s really important now to wrestle that power back and to say how you want your own fiction to be defined, if you do at all. FH Are you happy about being compared to writers such as Salman Rushdie or Vikram Seth in the sense of being a “Midnight’s Child” if one can use that term? SDS These are writers that I respect immensely, their fiction has influenced my life and my imagination but I find categories that lump together people by the colour of their skin or by geographical or national demarcation very limiting. So I’m very grateful for these entirely undeserved comparisons with people like Vikram Seth and Salman Rushdie but it would be far more interesting if if somebody had read a book of mine and found some ressonance with a Spanish writer or Chilean photographer, this would be far more interesting and engaging for me. FH Let’s talk a little about contemporary India. I’d like to hear about your attitude to ageing, which is a topic that comes up in your novels, and the traditional values of deference and respect to the elderly. Are you conscious of any significant changes in this area in recent years? SDS I will answer not broadly but specifically. I moved back from California to India to care for my parents. My mother has since passed away and I came back because my father had cancer. What was important to me was what how he aged. The idea of actually living on well into the sunset years has lost its patina, has lost its shine for me. Taking care of my father after he had his cancer made me rethink the importance of actually accepting medical care in certain situations. So he had brain cancer, he been treated, he’s completely fine . . . .but the chemotherapy has damaged his brain to a point where his life for him is not as meaningful as it was. Was it important for him to have taken the treatment in that case? That was an important takeaway for me. So I can 134 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.133-137, ISSN 2339-8523 FELICITY HAND ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------speak about it personally, there was that sense of moving back. How he aged and whether it is important to get the medical attention available is also a big question. FH Do the elderly still occupy a central role in families? SDS That shift has happened so while people are very devoted to their parents they often move away. This was my case, I lived away from Bombay, my sister lives in Bangalore. So while we are very devoted to our parents there is also a certain shift, a certain space…. FH I imagine that would be be class-based. SDS Oh, sure but then most things are class-based, money-centric, how much you can do for someone is reliant on how much economic freedom you have. FH True. The trouble is people in the West have this idea of the authentic India being found in the villages. They don’t contemplate the idea of the middle class value system which is not perhaps so different from ours. SDS People are humans, we are more alike than we are unlike. FH You have mentioned in one of your essays the BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party]. I should add that the news coverage on the elections was rather scanty here in Spain. Some information about the BJP was of course talked about, but I wondered if you think there will be any kind of backlash, a return to more traditional roles as far as what we were talking about, a more open attitude to gender roles. SDS I’m hestitant to comment on that party because there is an institutionalized hatred towards Narendra Modi, some of which is entirely deserved, but another thing is not respecting that fact that he is an incredibly shrewd political operator. He may not choose to implement the politics of hatred that he exercised in Gujarat when he’s in Delhi because he knows that he’s playing to a larger audience. The politics of hate that would have worked in the state [of Gujarat] may not necessarily apply when he’s playing on the international stage. This is very much the role he is playing. He’s also invited leaders from countries that India has historically had problems with such as Pakistan. Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.133-137, ISSN 2339-8523 135 A TALK WITH SIDDHARTH DHANVANT SHANGHVI ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------He is a man who is operating with a different apparatus so he will be guided by what is good or bad for tourism – the larger footfall of people, of votes, of international public perception - so he’ll not do anything that is bad for business. I’m pretty sure that he’ll be guided by what is acceptable in western societies because that’s what our market is. In that sense, it might be safe to say he’s not going to rock the boat. FH So the so-called Muslim minority [172 million people according to the 2011 census] will have nothing to fear? SDS I’m sure they do. I’m sure they’re watching their backs. FH Will you give us your views on changes, if there have been any, towards rape and gender violence. What about people’s attitude that if a woman is out late she is “asking for it”. I’m thinking of the 2012 Delhi gang rape which was reported extensively in the Spanish press. SDS Yes, this is the case of a young woman who was returning on a bus and was assaulted by several men and gang raped. She was identified in the Indian press as irbhaya, “the fearless one”, which I find offensive because it is taking away the heinousness of what happened. This was the most fearful, horrifying, outrageous, inhuman act - - - so how can you call it fearless? So it was obviously someone who decided to make it a cause celebre: let’s call her the fearless one. It was some idiot on a newsdesk in Delhi who decided he was in a position to decide how she was to be looked at publicly. I don’t think these attitudes have changed, they don’t change overnight. What is important is that the language is changing, people insist on calling it by its name: rape. In due course, wider understandings of sexual violence will come to India. In other parts of the world they are talking about the rape of men at the hands of women, 42% men claim to have been sexually assaulted by women. Another important fact is when they are looking at statistics they fail to look at men in prisons, which is the highest concentration of rape of a group of people anywhere. And let’s not forget that America has the highest incidence of reported rapes of women. 136 Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.133-137, ISSN 2339-8523 FELICITY HAND ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------FH In your novels you do break a lot of taboos about sex but there is still an area that seems to be still a great taboo and almost unthinkable, which is rape in families. SDS Let me tell you about an incident which involved me personally. It was a case of a wedding I heard about recently. You can’t imagine how offended I was because there was a uncle who was found guilty of having assaulted a cousin or a niece, and the people wanted the wedding to go ahead, which is a typical Indian situation. Their attitude was let’s not invite him to the wedding because of what he did. But not being invited to a wedding is not exactly castigation for the kind of crime. He should have been reported to the cops by the survivor. FH So it still is a taboo SDS The reality is that the majority of rape cases are committed by someone who is known to the family. Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi (b. 1977) has two bestselling novels to his credit. His debut novel The Last Song of Dusk (2004) won the Betty Trask Award, one of the best known prizes for new writers in the United Kingdom and the Italian award Grinzane Cavour, as well as being nominated to the international IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His second novel Lost Flamingoes of Bombay, published in 2009, was short-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize. Shanghvi has been voted one of the fifty most powerful young Indian people by India Today, one of the ten most creative men according to Hindustan Times, as well as “The Next Big Thing” by The Sunday Times, among others. He currently collaborates with TIME magazine and he has contributed to the editorial pages of The ew York Times. Indi@logs, Vol 2 2015, pp.133-137, ISSN 2339-8523 137